Critique and Conviction: Conversations with Francois Azouvi and Marc de Launay

CRITIQUE AND CONVICTION Conversations with Fran(:ois Azouvi and Marc de Launay Paul Ricoeur Translated by Kathleen Bla...

Author: Paul Ricoeur

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CRITIQUE AND CONVICTION Conversations with Fran(:ois Azouvi and Marc de Launay

Paul Ricoeur

Translated by Kathleen Blarney

Columbia University Press New York

Columbia University Press Publishers Since 1893 New York Chichester, West Sussex English translation © Polity Press 1998 First published in France as La Critique et fa Conviction © Calmann-Levy 1995 This translation first published 1998 by Polity Press in association with Blackwell Publishers Ltd. Published with the assistance of the French Ministry of Culture. All rights reserved. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Ricreur, Paul. [La Critique et la conviction. English] Critique and conviction: conversations with Franc;ois Azouvi and Marc de Launay / Paul Ricreur. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references. ISBN 0-231-10734-X 1. Ricreur, Paul-Interviews. 2. Philosophers-France-Interviews. I. Azouvi, Franc;ois, 1945- . II. Launay, Marc B. de. III. Title. B2430.R553C 1998 194-dc21 97-27567 CIP

Casebound editions of Columbia University Press books are printed on permanent and durable acid-free paper. Printed in Great Britain c 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

To the memory of Mikel Dufrenne, my friend

Contents

Note to the Reader 1 From Valence to Nanterre

lX

1

2 FrancelUnited States: Two Incomparable Histories

41

3 From Psychoanalysis to the Question of the Self, or Thirty Years of Philosophical Work

68

4 Politics and Totalitarianism

95

5 Duty of Memory, Duty of] ustice

116

6 Education and Secularism

127

7 Biblical Readings and Meditations

139

8 Aesthetic Experience

171

Notes

187

Note to the Reader

The conversations that make up the present book took place in October-November 1994, in May and September 1995 at ChatenayMalabry, in Paul Ricoeur's study. The recording was transcribed and submitted to Paul Ricoeur, who read it over and completed it. We have added bibliographical notes when this seemed necessary for the intelligibility of the text. However, we did not think it advisable to eliminate all the overlaps inherent in the conversational form; weaving from one topic to another, they also form a kind of guiding thread. F. A. and M. de L.

Chapter 1

From Valence to Nanterre

• Paul Ricoeur, you are above all a man of writing. Nevertheless, you were kind enough to accept the principle of a series of conversations. What does this represent for you? • I wish to say first that this is a form of language use that I fear a great deal, because I am indeed a person who writes but also someone who rewrites, who crosses out. I am usually, therefore, mistrustful of improvisation. And yet I have accepted your offer - for two reasons. First because you belong to the generation of my best friends, a generation that is half-way between the old age in to which I am advancing and the youth I no longer engage with in the face-to-face contact of teaching. You are in the middle of life and you provide me with a closeness, a companionship, and, I might say, the grace of friendship. I would not have agreed to enter into this discussion with anyone other than yourselves. The second reason has to do with the very nature of the conversations. I want to take the risk once in my life of precisely what dialogue allows, that is a language that is less controlled. I spoke a moment ago of crossing-out; now this crossing out is a kind of self-censure. Besides, I have always refrained from revealing confidences. The level to which we shall confine ourselves will be half-way between self-censure and personal confidence; a way of letting out what, alone with myself and the blank page, I might have crossed out, but especially what I would not have written. Here we are, between speech and writing, in a genre that affords us great freedom because vast expanses of language can be left, if not in their raw state, at least in their native, spontaneous state, while others, on the contrary, will be rewritten; in this way, the reader will be offered a variety of levels of speech and writing.

2 From Valence to Nanterre The freedom, the very boldness that this tone implies will enable me to speak off the cuff, as it were, on themes I have not written about, precisely because my thought had not yet attained the level of formulation, of sufficient rigour which I generally insist upon in my writings; this is the case, in particular, for the reflections on aesthetic experience. This will perhaps be the benefit - the reader will decide - of a less tightly controlled discussion. Along the same lines, I should also like to say that we are going to play, in alternation, not only with the broader range but also with comparisons that I have not made previously. I am thinking, for example, of the religious and philosophical domains, which I have staunchly kept separate from one another for reasons I have always sought to justify. But here, in this more open conversation, I shall be more concerned with the problems arising from the interferences, the overlaps of the religious and the philosophical. In writing, I can separate these domains more explicitly and in a more concerted manner; on the other hand, in the exchanges we are going to have, where the man will speak more than the author, I shall have less justification for cultivating the sort of controlled schizophrenia that has always been my rule of thought. Here the rule of life will overtake the rule of thought.

• On the whole, you are taking the risk of linking together, more closely than you have done in your writings, the two poles that have provided the title of this book: critique and conviction? • Right now, I shall say that critique is no longer on one side and conviction on the other; in each of the fields that are traversed or touched upon I shall attempt to show that there is, to different degrees, a subtle blending of conviction and critique.

• You have devoted several important works to the theme of subjectivity; your most recent work is entitled Oneself as Another. But about you yourself, your life, your intellectual background, very little is known. Where did you spend your early childhood? • I was born in 1913 in Valence, where my father was an English teacher. The crucial fact of my childhood was being a pupille de La nation, that is, the son of a victim of the First World War, of a father who himself had been widowed several months before he was killed in September 1915, at the Battle of the Marne. I have a memory, whether it is actually a recollection or whether it is a reconstruction on the basis of what I was told, I don't know: November 11, 1918 was not a day of victory and joy in our household.


3

I seem to remember having seen a trainload of noisy and joyful soldiers, while at home we were in mourning. Because we did not know if my father was actually dead: we had received only a notice of his disa ppearance. It was only much later, in 1932, that someone discovered his body while ploughing a field; he was identified by his dogtag. So the war came to a close in the mourning for my father; and this is why I have no memory of a joyous armistice, still less the memory of a victory. I have a photograph of him, taken during his only leave, at the beginning of 1915; my sister and I are on his knees. Ever since, this image has never shifted; but I myself have grown older and little by little I have had to get used to the idea of a father who is younger than I, whereas at first I had the image of a man without age, situated above me. I have had to assimilate it as the figure of a young man whom I have gone beyond in life. Even today, I have difficulty dealing with my relation to this image, set for all eternity as that of a young man. I feel the same way in the presence of monuments to the dead, before the evocation of "Our children," wondering: but who are these children? Strangely, the monument speaks of a child who is my father, to another child who, himself, will not stop growing older. I have just read, moreover, a similar discussion in The First Man by Camus. This relation to the figure of my father was extremely important because of the reversal to which it was subjected in the following circumstances. His image had been used as a means of educating me in a manner I disapprove of now. I was always told: "What if your father could see you!" I had to satisfy an absent viewer, who, what is more, was a hero. Then, around the age of ten or twelve, I was influenced by a man - our landlord, a Catholic pacifist of the Marc Sangnier tendency! - who turned me around completely by "demonstrating" to me that in the "Great War" France had been the aggressor, that the continuation of hostilities after Verdun had been a disgrace, that the Treaty of Versailles was a shame for which all of Europe was paying the price. And it was from this perspective that I viewed the rise of Hitlerism. This image has remained very sharp, and I have not entirely given up the idea that France bears considerable responsibility in this respect. In my eyes, then, my father had died for nothing; and when he had ceased to be a figure of moral censure, I had to struggle with this new vision of the war and of him . • What happened when your father died? • My sister and I were taken in by our paternal grandparents and we lived in Rennes, where my grandfather was a civil servant. I was therefore cut off from a large part of my family, mainly from those in

4 From VaLence to Nanterre

Savoie and Geneva on my mother's side. So in addition to being an orphan and a pupille de La nation, a good part of my family was unknown to me. From a very early age I found myself solely in the presence of my paternal grandparents. I did, of course, have an unmarried aunt who devoted herself to our upbringing, but she was herself under the hand of my grandparents until the death of my grandmother, when I was fourteen years old. There is no doubt that this genealogical configuration was at once very formative - because the upbringing I received exerted a very strong influence - and at the same time very traumatic, since the maternal side was hidden, the young woman who raised me was herself under the tutelage of an ancestral figure, and in addition the paternal figure - a heroic figure and unattainable model, questioned quite early on - was absent. From time to time, I met cousins, but the maternal place was never occupied. Actually, I only understood the figure of the mother through the way my wife was perceived by her children. The word "mama" was a word pronounced by my children but never by me. • You mentioned your sister. • Yes, that touches something very deep, something that, many years later, would be reawakened by another death. My sister Alice became infected with tuberculosis at the age of seventeen. Born in 1911, she was about two years older than I. She died at twenty-one, but her youth was in a sense eclipsed by mine. I have regretted this all my life, with the impression that she received less than her due, while I received more than mine; I still struggle with the feeling of an unpaid debt, with the feeling that she suffered an injustice from which I benefited. This must have played an important role in my life: the "unpaid debt" is a persistant theme, turning up frequently in my work. • Why do you say that your youth eclipsed hers? • I was a very good student, whereas she encountered many difficulties in her studies. Everyone sang my praises, while she received little attention. She was a sweet girl who asked for nothing for herself and who ungrudgingly accepted that I was the one who reaped the acclaim. • And the aunt who devoted herself to raising you? • She was my father's sister, eleven years his junior: she was just a girl when she took charge of us, my sister and me. She died in 1968; she lived with us the last ten years of her life.


5

So I spent my childhood and my early adolescence in a household of older people, where reading played a dominant role: few games, a great amount of reading, to the point that school became more a form of recreation to me than a discipline. Even before the school year began, over extremely austere vacations, I had in a very short time covered all the school books: going to class was more of an entertainment, and I was, moreover, most inattentive in the classroom.

• How did you acquire a taste for reading? Did grandparents?

)'OU

get it from

• No, I discovered reading by myself. I spent a lot of time in bookstores. It was the period when one could read in bookstores despite the difficulty of the uncut pages of the books. One would skip pages, read diagonally • Do you remember the books that marked you in the course of your discoveries? • Between twelve and fifteen, I read a lot of Jules Verne, Walter Scott, then Dickens in seconde, Rabelais, Montaigne, Pascal; in premiere and then in the final year, in terminale, the philosophy class, Stendhal, Flaubert, Tolstoy and, especially, Dostoyevsky, who has always fascinated me!

• You have never made a mystery of your Protestantism. Was the milieu in which you lived in Rennes strongly religious? • My paternal grandparents came from two very ancient pockets of Protestantism, going back to the Reformation: my grandmother coming from the Bearn region and my grandfather from Normandy, from a village by the name of Luneray, a sort of boutonniere where the tradition of the Reformation had been continuous since the sixteenth century, hardly affected by emigration or forced conversions. My greatgrandfather was an artisan who wove cloth, which he then sold at the market in Dieppe. When hand-weaving was destroyed by the industrial mills, part of the family became factory workers, another opted for public service. My paternal grandfather began his career as a teacher in a Protestant school. And when the Protestant churches gave their schools to the state, he was taken in hand by a departmental treasurer, managing the office. This strong Huguenot tradition was deeply rooted in history. On my grandfather's side, there was an evolution towards liberal Protestantism, whereas, on my grandmother's side, the direction

6


was that of Pietist Protestantism. I even think that there was a heavy dose of what was called Darbyism/ which was quite sectarian. My memories are not very precise. In fact, my parish environment was certainly more open than the family environment; the latter being a haven for me, safe and secure. • You had a religious education that, from the outset, included reading the Bible. • Yes, reading the Bible was central to this milieu. My grandmother read it regularly, a practice I inherited and have continued, during my youth and after. This reading was not undertaken in a literal-minded spirit but instead followed a conception I would call pneumatological: it indeed inspired everyday life; the Psalms, the writings of Wisdom and the Beatitudes occupied a more important place than dogma. Not being an intellectual milieu, it was quite undogmatic and gave preference to the private practice of reading, of prayer, and the examination of conscience. I have always moved back and forth between these two poles: a Biblical pole and a rational and critical pole, a duality that, finally, has lasted through my entire life. • And you spontaneously saw this as a kind of bipolarity? • Absolutely. After all, it is a position no more tormented than that of Levinas, who has moved back and forth between Judaism and Dostoyevsky I have been concerned - living a kind of double allegiance - not to confuse the two spheres, to acknowledge continuous negotiation within a well-established bipolarity. The philosophy class was a hard test in this regard, all the more so as at the same time the influence of Karl Barth was beginning to influence French Protestantism, directing it towards a radical and, one would have to admit, antiphilosophical return to the Biblical text. In my undergraduate years I was passionately drawn to Bergson, in particular to the Bergson of Two Sources of Morality and Religion: I was caught then between a religious philosophy of the Bergsonian type and Barthian radicalism. At that time, I experienced an inner conflict which was exacerbated to the point of threatening to rupture the double allegiance to which, ultimately, I remained faithful. • Let us talk for a moment about your year ill the philosophy class at the Rennes secondary school.


7

• The philosophy class and my meeting Roland Dalbiez, who taught it, figure as the high point of my schooling; I was dazzled, a vast new world opened. I had read a lot of classics - literature but also those called "philosophes": Diderot, Voltaire, Rousseau - and it was these "philosophes" that I had read in premiere, the year before, more than Corneille, Racine or Moliere. Rousseau, in particular, had made a strong impression on me, and this naturally placed me in a position to begin the year of philosophy. Roland Dalbiez was an extraordinary individual: a former naval officer, he had discovered philosophy later in life through Jacques Maritain. He was a scholastic, and all of his teaching was governed by rational psychology and, in philosophy, by realism. He had the greatest aversion to what he called "idealism," of which he gave a caricaturish, even pathological, portrait. I don't know if it is a memory I constructed after the fact, but I believe I can still see him depicting idealism as a huge pincer stretching out in space, and grasping nothing, turning back upon itself. Idealism was presented in this way as pathological "derealism," which he compared to schizophrenia, which was beginning to be widely discussed in psychiatry. The second aspect of his teaching, one which was of real benefit to me, was a concern with argumentation. This did not prevent him from quickly shutting us up with a few Latin formulas worthy of a great scholastic - our Latin was not advanced enough to contradict him, or even to understand him. His course followed the prescribed program (perception, memory, habit, and so on) and always from the perspective of a progression that, starting with the philosophy of nature, would lead to a philosophy of the soul. But what I fundamentally owe to him is a precept. As he saw that I was hesitant about committing myself to a career in philosophy, for fear of losing a number of certainties, he said to me: when an obstacle presents itself, you have to confront it, not slip around it; never be afraid to go and see. This kind of philosophical intrepidness has sustained me throughout my life. I should add that he was one of the first to attempt a philosophical reading of Freud3 - which would prove very important to me in my future philosophical path. His Freud was the "biological" Freud; he stressed the realist conception of the unconscious which he used to refute the "Cartesian illusion" of self-consciousness, and the alleged reduction of the world to my representation. I recently had the opportunity to sketch his portrait in a little book entitled Honneur aux maitres, put together by Marguerite Lena, in which each contributor speaks of his or her first master. I was able in this way to pay homage to Roland Dalbiez.4

8


• Rennes was a Catholic stronghold. Did you have the feeling of belonging to a minority? • At that time I was indeed very conscious of this, and the woman who was to become my wife, Simone Lejas, was even more keenly aware of it, probably because girls were much more affected by the Catholic religion than boys were. For me, the Catholic universe was completely foreign, and it is only quite recently that I was invited to give a talk at a private Catholic school in Rennes; I thought I would never even penetrate that world. It was elsewhere, and much later, that I became acquainted with Catholicism, but in Rennes Protestants were perceived as belonging to a minority and they lived without any close ties to the Catholic sphere of the vast majority - a situation perhaps comparable to tha t of Jews in a Christian milieu. I had the feeling of being considered a heretic by the majority. That is probably why the surrounding urban environment did not influence me much. I found only limited freedom there, and there was little point in hoping that it would recognize me fully. But I did not really suffer from this for I was busy reading. The outside world was instead a matter of curiosity.

• Did you have Catholic friends? • Yes, in secondary school. The secondary schools in Brittany - which I knew later as an instructor, as I taught in three of them, Saint-Brieuc, Lorient and Rennes - were attended in particular by the children of schoolteachers and professors. Because Catholic secondary education, which was very strong in this region, siphoned off a large number of students, whose families were opposed to public education. Only the resolutely republican and secular families - above all the teachers made it a point of honor to defend the public system and to send their children to these schools. But it was nonetheless secondary school that served as an intermediary for me between the rather closed environment in which I was raised and the somewhat foreign Catholic environment that I contemplated from the outside; for not all the Catholic families were wealthy enough to afford private schools or hostile enough to secular instruction to deprive their children of the high level of teaching current in those days. I felt more comfortable in the secular environment than among the Catholics, even if some of them were very good schoolmates of mine.

• Did you make up your mind quickly to study philosophy? • No, at first I resisted. I tried to do a degree in letters, but since all my


9

papers were criticized as being "too philosophical," I shifted direction after a semester. I had tried to enter the Ecole Normale Superieure but Dalbiez, in fact, did not prepare us for this type of test; I received a pitiful score of 7/20 on the entrance examination, on the theme: "The soul is easier to know than the body." I must have been the only candidate not to know that this was a quotation from Descartes. Of course, I had argued that it was the body that was better known. I was obviously not on my way to the Rue d'Ulm. As a pupille de fa nation I was under an obligation to complete my studies quickly - this was very constraining - and, at twenty years old, as soon as I had my degree (licence), I had to teach. So I was not able to prepare any longer for the Rue d'Ulmthis would have meant entering a Parisian preparatory class (khagne). I was very good in Latin and in Greek but I was not up to standard in either philosophy or French. This is how I happened to find myself in October 1933 at the Saint-Brieuc secondary school- both boys' and girls' sections - with a teaching load of eighteen hours a week, while at the same time writing my master's thesis with Leon Brunschvicg in Paris on Lachelier and Lagneau. 5 • When you started teaching, you were almost the same age as your students. What do you remember about this? • I was two or three years older than they were. It was decisive for me to be "thrown" so quickly into teaching, and this was to remain a constant: my work in philosophy has always been tied to teaching. I had to give a framework to my personal reflections - insofar as I had any by then - that was compatible with the content of my teaching. After Saint-Brieuc, in 1933-4, I benefited from a scholarship to prepare the agregation, still as a pupille de La nation, thanks to Georges Davy.6 As a result, I had the good fortune of being a student at the Sorbo nne for a year and then the good luck to pass the examination on the first try, carrying off second place, in 1935. The year of the agregation was incredibly intense for me. I had the impression of having to fill a huge gap in one fell swoop. In a year I had covered the ground, as it were, filling in what Dalbiez had not taught me, although he had equi pped me intellectually to be in a position to acquire all this: the Stoics - whom Leon Robin had us read that year and whom I did not know at all- but also Descartes, Spinoza, Leibniz. I read, besides, everything that Gabriel Marcel had written. • Gabriel Marcel? • Yes, every Friday I went to his house; his Socratic teaching helped me

10


a great deal. He set a single rule: never quote authors, always start from examples and reflect by oneself. In reading two articles by him that same year I discovered Karl Jaspers. And it was also during this period that I began to read Husserl's Ideas for Pure Phenomenology, in English translation.

• And after the agregation? • I was married just after, in 1935, to a childhood friend from the same Protestant community in Rennes. Then I went to teach in Colmar, where we spent our first year of married life. The following year, I did my military service with the infantry. This I did grudgingly, nourishing profound hostility with respect to the military, first because I was older than the other soldiers, then because this meant an interruption in my intellectual work. This is where I discovered that France was still basically a rural country. Very few of the conscripts had university degrees. Having lived in an urban setting, it was the first time I had encountered this rural environment. The months I spent in training at Saint-Cyr (I was a reserve officer) were unpleasant: I was poorly treated by the training officers because I was perceived as unruly, which 1pro bably was. That was the year when, out of a spirit of contradiction, I read Marx all the time, in counterpoint to Henri de Man. Then I returned to Brittany, where I taught at the secondary school in Lorient from 1937 to 1939. The year in Colmar was important to me because I already knew that I would turn towards German philosophy; this was actually the reason why I had chosen that town. 1 took German lessons with a colleague at school (I had not previously studied German). Then 1went to summer school in Munich, where I took intensive classes, and this ended in 1939 with the declaration of war. I shall always remember how the signature of the German-Soviet pact was hailed. When the French Consul told us, "Now, it is war," I left the following day.

• What is your memory of the atmosphere in Munich at that time? • I remember perfectly the Feldherrnhalle: two Nazi giants mounted the guard, and we made a detour so we would not ha ve to give the Hitler salute, which was obligatory. My wife and I were lodged with a Catholic family, and the wife, who was very much against Hitler, used to say, "Hitler has taken our children from us." I noted at that time, among certain Catholics, a reticence concerning Nazism, which Pius XI had, moreover, explicitly condemned in 1937 in his encyclical "Mit brennender Sorge." As for the Germans of my age, they were either


11

enthusiastic Hitler supporters or people who preferred to remain silent. I was also struck by the fact that the Romanian and Hungarian students who were there all supported Hitler. Everyone admitted to the university had been carefully screened. In France, no one thought that study in Germany should be avoided. Those who were first in the agregation continued to go to Berlin until 1939. • In the early 1930s, did you follow events? Were people discussing them around you? • Yes, I was actually involved in the socialist youth movements early on. I was quite militant when I was in Saint-Brieuc, and a little later in Lorient, and also in Colmar. I remember that I took part in the marches of the Popular Front on July 14, 1936. I deeply supported the socialist cause, under the influence of a man who played a certain postwar role: Andre Philip. He was also a Protestant, influenced by Barth; he was trying to combine Protestantism and socialism without falling prey to the mistaken assumption to which many Christian socialists are prone, proclaiming that socialism is already entirely contained within Christianity. This is a mistake I have never made, thanks precisely to Andre Philip. Here again, I am assuming a double allegiance, with two orientations which are rather flexibly linked. There are, of course, in the Gospels certain maxims for action - all the duties implied by the particular respect owed to the poor, for instance - but in order to provide a rational basis for socialist commitment, an economic argument is required - Marxian or other - of a different nature than moral impulse alone, one that could not be deduced directly from love of one's neighbor. There has never been, in my eyes, reason for any confusion of these two orders. • How did you meet Andre Philip? • He was a professor at the law school in Lyons when I was in SaintBrieuc, and I met him in the Protestant youth movements. When he attended socialist congresses, he used to preach on Sunday in the towns where the meetings were held. It was a way of countering the somewhat summary anticlericalism of the socialist party in those days. • So you went on to extend your Protestant religious education and your participation in the youth movements into participati01z in student movements?

12


• Yes, and I spent a great deal of time during this period on Marx and the libertarian socialists. Andre Philip also had me read Henri de Man. Philip advocated a humanist socialism before the writings of the young Marx, the 1844 Manuscripts in particular, were translated. But two earlier events had already played a decisive role, albeit on the periphery of politics: the death sentence given to Sacco and Vanzetti in the United States in 1927, which aroused my profound indignation, and then the Seznec affair.? So early on I experienced a sort of physical revulsion that made me extremely sensitive to certain singular injustices which I later came to think were symptoms of more general phenomena. It was this kind of indignation that was in a certain way moralized, intellectualized by doctrine, the doctrine of a socialism compatible with a moral vision of the world. My friends and my wife's family included anarchosyndicalists: one of Simone's uncles, a very fine typesetter for OuestEclair (which became Ouest-France), belonged to this "book" milieu, whose ideology suited me just fine. They were much closer to the anarchist tradition than to Marxism, with regard to which I myself never felt comfortable, intellectually speaking. • Did you participate in meetings? • I confined myself more to personal reflections and to readings because I do not think that there was any organized movement in Rennes. I really only became acquainted with the local groups of the Socialist Party in Saint-Brieuc; Colmar and Lorient, especially Lorient, in the years 1937-9, just after the Popular Front. And, looking back on it I understand better how the Socialist Party of that time got into the untenable position that split its practice from its doctrine. There were then two opportunities for choosing, which were alerts, so to speak: the Spanish civil war and Munich. And in both instances, the choice was ambiguous, because one had either to resort to force or risk having to do so. It found itself obliged to contend with its own antimilitarist basis. And until the declaration of war, it had not succeeded in freeing itself from this dilemma. All its choices were uncertain. Sometimes the majority went in one direction, sometimes in the other - Blum is entirely typical: he was torn between something like the desire to help those in danger - from the perspective of international solidarity - and a viceral antimilitarism, in which the military was itself the hated adversary. The war put the Socialist Party in the same situation when, in 1940, the majority of its deputes voted for Petain. • What were your own reactions to the war in Spain?


13

• I myself was divided between these same tendencies and the choice was rather aleatory because there was no determinable product of these two forces, only a circumstantial one: in meetings, the votes of the members were split in an absolutely haphazard manner. What finally won out was nonintervention, in the manner of repeated retreats in the face of Hitler; but it was not perceived in this way. I would say that the negative fascination produced by the Croix-de-Feu, 8 by La Rocque (who himself ended up in the concentration camps), obliterated the international horizon. To be sure, one has to be careful not to project onto the past what is known to have occurred later, as if, in those days, people had before them two alternatives, with fuLL knowledge of their consequences. We have to admit that certain choices were made in a kind of fog. In this regard, the example of the Israeli historian Zeev Sternhell,9 whom I recently met, is significant: in his books there is a vision of this period of history that is implicitly teleological and that falsifies perspectives. The facts he alleges are true, but not the light of finality through which he presents them. As though there had been only two histories for France: the Enlightenment on the one hand and, on the other, fascistic nationalism. Now some may well have belonged to both, at the moments when the paths were intertwined, blurred I think that what he underestimates - perhaps more than others - is the extraordinary tumult of the prewar years, where, for instance, people who became Fascists were side by side with people who became Gaullists.1t was a period of experimentation of all types, where the weaknesses of the institutions of the Third Republic were exposed. It is true that at the same time we made it even more fragile by our unbounded critiques at any rate, this is what I understand in retrospect: the weaknesses for which we reproached the Republic were also the product of the actions we took against it. • All things considered, it was something like what happened, on the German side, with the Weimar Republic. • Absolutely. And it is also what would later take place with respect to the Fourth Republic, at least to a certain extent. But I think that people have been too harsh on it, for the admittedly weak, centrist governments that foLLowed one another were constantly caught in the crossfire between the GauLLists and the Communists. • At what moment did you become aware of the true nature of Stalin's USSR?

14


• It was really the Kravchenko affair in 1949 that was the decisive turning point. Les Lettres Fran(aises, the journal directed by Aragon, had brought a suit against the defector after the publication of his book, I Chose Freedom; the Communists had accused him of being a fraud and a CIA agent. Before the war, even the famous Moscow trials had not managed to tarnish the positive image that we had of Stalin's USSR However, from my point of view, the fact of belonging to the Socialist Party also implied being in competition with the Communists and so helped to keep me from sharing in the enthusiasm so many intellectuals displayed for the "country of the workers." Being in the "old house," as it was called at the time, meant being on the other side. This immunized us against the fascination with communism. So both before the war and after it, I was sheltered from temptation. What strikes me now is the fragility of the positions that were taken, even on the level of domestic politics: to have drawn up an entire economic plan on the basis of the "two hundred families" and the slogan "the wall of money" was really incredibly simplistic. to I recall having taken part in meetings in the Colmar bistros, in 1935-6, on the nationalization of the Bank of France: we were provided with a short list of arguments by the "old hou~e" to show that a country was master of its economy only if it was master of its currency and that, in order for that to happen, the Bank of France had to be nationalized. We by no means perceived the Jacobin character of this reasoning, nor did we see the concentration of powers it necessarily implied, which was contrary to the libertarian, anarcho-syndicalist vision that was very strong then. I think that the friction within the SFIOll between the libertarian tendency and the Jacobin tendency has always produced the result that sometimes a majority emerged on one side, sometimes on the other of every issue, whether foreign or domestic. Indeed, the SFIO was itself the result of a merger between the anarcho-syndicalist libertarian strand and the strand promoting a centralized state. But this also produced some poisoned fruits, precisely in foreign policy, since it contributed to disarming us in the face of the real adversary: Hitler, who also drew on this anarcho-syndicalist source What disarmed us in the face of Hitler is the very thing that protected us against Stalin.

• In short, it was your pre-war political affiliation that did not permit you to see clearly the danger coming from Germany.

• The error of people like me was first of all not to perceive the approach of war and then, when we knew it would occur, to continue to think of it in terms of the First. Because of the Treaty of Versailles,


15

the reasons for adhering patriotically to the First World War had already been denounced; the fact of presenting the Second as a conflict between nations against the backdrop of patriotism produced exactly the same rejection. I think today thatthis extrapolation was wrongheaded inasmuch as the second conflict resulted from an entirely different set of circumstances. But I continue to think that the First World War was a monstrous error and a crime: bourgeoisies that were in fact quite similar perverted their own working classes. They broke up the Second International, which quickly gave rise to the Third. One must always return to this; for it is in the feeling that the Treaty of Versailles was unjust that the pacifism of the socialist left found its justification, its cover. The argument consisted in saying that Hitler, after all, was doing no more than taking back what he had a right to. I still recall the headline of Crapouillot at the time of the occupation of the left bank of the Rhine: "Germany invades Germany." Basically, Hitler had to be ceded what the Germans had the right to take back. Nevertheless, I had been warned by Andre Philip, who himself had not made that choice: he was clearly opposed to Munich, while I was hesitant. I felt on the one hand that Czechoslovakia was suffering a great injustice and that it was even the victim of a crime, but on the other hand that the Sudetenland was despite everything a German territory. I was taken aback by the aggression against Poland. We see this, moreover, in all the writings of Patocka: he says everywhere in them that it was the First World War that constituted the turning point; the First War was the "suicide of Europe." We did not understand that the Second stemmed from an entirely different set of problems, that it resulted from the rise to power of totalitarianisms. But what made it less possible for us to have a clear vision of things was that we had become the allies of one totalitarianism against the other. • Was your pacifism also fed by your reading of Alain? Was he a great figure for you?

• No, not really. I had met him, but only when I was working on my master's thesis on Lagneau, since he had published the first series of Celebres Le(ons. I read his Propos only later in captivity under the influence of my new friend Mikel Dufrenne, who had been his student. • And what impression did he make on you?

• Stimulating, but that was also because he had some strong anarchistic elements in him, especially in his opposition to the powers that be.

16


• You came back from Munich in 1939, when war was declared. You must have been called up right away . • By September of 1939 I was assigned to a Brittany regiment from Saint Malo, remarkable people. I experienced the defeat in 1940 against the backdrop of personal guilt. I still keep the memory of the unbearable images of the flight of the armies in the North; I still see a sort of stereotypical soldier, wearing a bowler ha t and pushing a baby carriage full of bottles of wine. I could not help but say to myself: "So here is what I have brought about through political mistakes, through passivity, for not having understood that, in the face of Hitlerism, France should not have been disarmed." This reproach has stayed with me and has led me always to be wary of my political judgment. Even though I have kept allegiances with socialism, and do not deny certain of its presuppositions, I think that political positions I took in those days were mistaken and even culpable. In May of 1940 I found myself in a unit that had fought well and that, still fighting, had attempted to stem the flood of the army in retreat. I was then in a small unit which had been entirely isolated; I remember that the captain said to me, "Ricoeur, go east and west to liaison." For four or five kilometres, there was no one on either side. We were in a pocket, and we had attempted to prevent the Germans from passing. Through me, my section was awarded a citation for having held out. But we were taken prisoner; with the feeling that the choice was either dying or surrendering, I chose the second alternative. I remember clearly that after three days under the bombardment of the German Stukas, without artillery, without aircraft, crushed, we heard at 3 a.m. the German loudspeakers saying in French: "At six o'clock we will attack and you will all be killed." The chaplain and I made the decision to wake up the twenty-five or thirty unfortunate soldiers huddled in the trenches and to surrender, not without a certain feeling of guilt; my earlier political choice seemed to have led to this disaster, and I mysel-f sanctioned it by a surrender. I left for captivity in Pomerania, where I spent five years. I was in an oflag, a prison camp for officers. In all honesty I have to say that, until 1941, I was attracted, along with many others - the propaganda was intense - to certain aspects of Petainism. It was probably that I held against the Republic the feeling of having participated in its weakness, the feeling that a new, stronger France had to be formed. This was the case so long as we had not received any news, had not heard the BBC, which, thanks to the Gaullists in the camp, we were able to listen to starting in the winter of 1941-2. A friend came to give us the BBC bulletin in the morning; he got it from someone else, but we never knew


17

from whom. Later, we were the ones who announced the defeats to the Germans themselves. One day we arrived shaved and well turned out to the assembly, the Germans asked us what the occasion was for this change in our habits, and we announced to them the victory of the Russians at Stalingrad! At that moment the camps had been completely taken over by the communists and the Gaullists. But I regret my error in judgment during the first year.

• What did you know in the camp about what was happening in France? • We knew that there was a legitimate government, that there was an American ambassador to Vichy - we watched that very closely - that a newly established educational system was based upon the values of virility, service, devotion. We were troubled when the general state of mind began to reflect no longer simply despondency but the desire to rebuild on the basis of what were practically feudal values. These were quite simply the principles followed by the Uriage school. 12 When I discovered after the war what had been done there, I realized that we were applying something similar spontaneously in the camps. The Uri age school was criticized by people like Sternhell under the pretext that the ideology of this school for cadres was fascist; yet the state of mind that characterized it was just the opposite of what had already become collaboration. It was a matter of putting France back on her feet, and we thought that this involved the Vichy conceptions as the government representatives presented them to us. The pamphlets they distributed to us revolved around this idea: the Republic had been weak, a strong France had to be remade, and this meant with the Germans. And yet I don't think any of us capitulated on the question of collaboration. The idea that guided us was more that of an inner renewal, along the lines of the youth movements, in a kind of continuity with what the Scouts had been before the war. And this is what we believed during the first year, when we were broken and cut off from the outside. The manner in which we contributed, positively, to this renewal within the camp consisted in rapidly establishing an intellectual life so as not to continue to suffer from the defeat. With Mikel Dufrenne, Roger Ikor, Paul-Andre Lesort, and others who had set up a theater, we reconstructed an institutionalized cultural life - a somewhat curious phenomenon, one no doubt peculiar to life in captivity, which is to try to create a replica of free society within the camp. There was even a market with stock quotations: students and professors of economics had a stock market, where the prices were calculated on the basis of a standard unit, not gold, but the Russian or American cigarette!

18


We started by collecting all the books in the camp. Then we organized a facsimile of a university with programs, courses, hours, enrollments, examinations. We undertook to learn all the languages we possibly could: Russian, Chinese, Hebrew, Arabic ... Five years is a long time! It was in this camp that I began to translate Husserl's Ideen 1,13 in the margins of my copy, because there was no paper. • How did the books get there? • Some had been brought in the haversacks. I myself had two: poetry by Valery and Claudel's Five Great Odes; these books really sustained me during the first year. And it was, moreover, thanks to them that I made the acquaintance of Mikel Dufrenne, who had given a lecture on these two authors, seldom presented together. Since there were between three and four thousand of us, we were able rapidly to put together a real lending library, one very carefully managed so that the works were not damaged and could circulate freely. Others carne in the packages sent by the families and by the Red Cross - it was, I believe, through the latter that I was able to read Husserl and Jaspers. There was also a clandestine source: a few kind camp officers were willing to borrow books from the university library! In this way I got to read works from the Greifswald library (which is now in Poland) obtained in exchange for cigarettes, as I didn't smoke. I was able to save my copy of Ideen I through a series of quite extraordinary circumstances. At the end of captivity, during the winter of 1944-5, our camp was moved further west, and the journey was made on foot - a difficult march for people who had received little food (to be sure, we were not in the state of destitution of those who had been deported) and were exhausted by the cold. We pulled our bags and the books we were trying to sa ve over the ice on wooden sleds. After three da ys of walking, it started to thaw . We lost everything because we could no longer carry what we had more or less been able to pull. With a few friends such as Dufrenne, Ikor and Lesort, we told ourselves we would not go any further. We had wanted to save a certain number of things: our papers, in particular. As for myself, I had started to write my future disserta tion on the will. We walked toward the east in the hope of being liberated by the Russians, and we found ourselves in a Polish farm where we were attacked by a Russian patrol that didn't know whom they were dealing with. Unfortunately, we had no map and we did not know where we were; in fact, we were not in the path of the Russians but in a space between two columns of the German army. The SS appeared: they had corne to search the area and they found us. They wanted to execute us. Since we spoke German, we were able to make


19

ourselves understood to a captain or a commander, and we were sent to a prison in Stettin, where I continued to work on the translation of Hussed's book for several weeks. Then we were put on a train and sent west; and so, the trip everyone else made on foot, we made by train. We ended up near Hanover in January of 1945. This new camp had not been made to hold the masses of prisoners that were packed in there; little by little, the guards disappeared, dressed in prisoners' clothes, or hiding, for their greatest fear was to be taken prisoner by the Russians. One fine day, no more guards! We continued our march towards the west and we ran into some Canadians. That is how we were "liberated! " Once I returned to Paris, the first person I went to visit was Gabriel Marcel: he welcomed me with open arms like a son. Then I saw Andre Philip again who was now a member of the government. And he was the one who sent me to Chambon-sur-Lignon, which I had never heard of before - a Protestant school that had sheltered so many Jewish children that it was honored in Israel. I found myself in an environment of militant pacifism of nonviolent members of the Resistance, who had acted as runners to take foreigners and Jews over the border. The Protestant school, which was an essential part of this system of resistance, welcomed me warmly. It was during the first winter there that I met American Quakers, themselves nonviolent resisters who had come to help with the construction of a larger school. It was through this connection that, a few years later in 1954, I went to the United States for the first time, invited by a Quaker college on the east coast of the United States.

• When did you learn of the death camps? • We witnessed the brutality inflicted on the Russian prisoners near our camp in Pomerania. But we had not discovered the horror of the deportation and extermination camps until the day we were liberated, because we found ourselves next to Bergen-Belsen. The English had emptied the village of Belsen as a reprisal, and we interrogated Germans who claimed not to know what was happening in the camp seven kilometres away. I saw the survivors coming out so haggard, many of them dying after taking their first steps, after eating jam or something. It was dreadful. All of a sudden, we had the feeling we had been incredibly spared. And those who felt this difference most strongly were our Jewish buddies, for the German army had always succeeded, against the SS, in retaining control of the prisoner-of-war camps. The SS never commanded these camps, and for this reason it was possible for Ikor and Levinas not to have to worry. I know that a certain number

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of Jews were sent into separate camps, sometimes with prisoners reputed to be subversive; but I have not read that these Jewish prisoners who were moved were made to suffer harsh treatment. As for myself, I found escape from the accumulation of memories of captivity in intellectual work. I closed the door of the camp behind me when I left, and brought out with me the people who were to become my friends, to the end of their lives in the case of those who have died before me. Some of these friends wanted to revisit the places of our captivity; as for myself, I did not have any desire to return to what is now Polish Pomerania.

• During your captivity, you did read a lot, especially German writers. In this way, what would become one of your strong points was taking shape: a thorough knowledge of the thinkers across the Rhine. Didn't these readings, in a prisoner-of-war camp, have a curative effect? • It was crucial for me to read Goethe, Schiller there, to make the circuit of great German literature over those five years. The first and the second Faust, among others, helped me to preserve a certain image of Germans and of Germany - the guards finally no longer existed, and I was living in books, somewhat as I had done as a child. The true Germany was there, the Germany of Husserl, of Jaspers. This enabled me, when I taught in Strasbourg in 1948, to help my students, most of whom had been soldiers in the German army and were coming late to their studies and believed that it was forbidden to speak German. I would say to them: imagine that you are in the company of Goethe, Schiller, Husserl

• What did you do right after the Liberation? • We lived in Chambon-sur-Lignon from 1945 to 1948. After a year I was appointed to the CNRS: I was allowed only five or six hours of teaching; so I taught part-time and continued meanwhile my translation of Husserl's Ideen I. I had a scare over it because someone else was also translating the same book on his own. Merleau-Ponty pleaded for my translation over the other one, which was never completed. I had finished my theses in 1948. But I was not able to defend them until 1950. In 1948, I received an appointment to the University of Strasbourg, where I wanted to go to be close to the German language. I stayed there for eight years. Eight very happy years, the best I have ever known. This had to do with the very harmonious relationships in our family life - my wife Simone, our sons Jean-Paul and Marc, born before the war, our daughter Noelle, born during my captivity and whom I first met


21

when she was five years old, Olivier whom we had in Chambon, and Etienne, in Strasbourg. This also had to do with the life we led in Strasbourg: the city was cordial, the university very engaging. The philosophy department had asked George Gusdorf and me to set up a philosophy circle promoting discussions and exchanges. Gusdorf had been appointed at the same time as I was: I succeeded Jean Hyppolite and Gusdorf, Georges Canguilhem. From Strasbourg, I made frequent trips to Germany; this is how I went to see Karl Jaspers14 in Heidelberg just before he left for exile in Switzerland. I was very struck by his almost Goethean nobility. He was a person who was very difficult to reach, shielded by his wife. It was learned later that Hannah Arendt had tried to reconcile Jaspers and Heidegger. She had succeeded as far as jaspers, a very generous person, was concerned, but she ran up against the ferocious resistance of Heidegger, who thought - was this a pretext? - that there were no words adequate to say that. Here too words are lacking jaspers had expected a sort of conversion from Germany, a collective confession of sins, and he ended up convincing himself that Germany could not measure up to its guilt. He who had been able to endure Nazism could not manage to bear the new republic. I think that he lacked patience because Adenauer went as far as possible, given the circumstances of the disaster, in the reconstruction of a genuine republic. I paid a second visit to jaspers, after he had been called to the University of Basle, to present to him the book that Mikel Dufrenne and I had published together (our first book), Karl Jaspers et La philosophie de L'existenceY He had been kind enough to write a very friendly preface, although he did not particularly care for our book; he found our discussion too systematic. jeanne Hersch who, like Hannah Arendt, has been one of the master's faithful, shared his reservations, I believe. In particular, she thought later that I betrayed jaspers for Heidegger, that I like all the French succumbed, she said, to the pernicious charm of Heidegger; which is half true, but also half false. • Did you meet Heidegger?

• At eerisy in 1955, and I took away a bad memory of it. He was literally guarded by Axelos and Beaufret,16 and he behaved like a schoolmaster. The central theme that had been chosen was the line from The Critique of Pure Reason: "existence is a position." He pointed his finger at us to read the next line and to put forward an explanation. But his comments were magnificent, especially on the poets. I believe it was the first time I paid attention to his relation to poetry. He had talked a

22


lot about Stefan George, and it seems to me that it was later that I discovered Paul Celano It was only little by little that I was caught up in the Heideggerian wave, probably because of a kind of weariness with respect to the emphatic, repetitive and vague character of Jaspers's great books, published after the war. Heidegger's genius was more striking to me then than the great talent of Jaspers. There is nothing eye-catching in Jaspers; it is a well-constructed, moderate philosophy. I had liked enormously certain short texts by him, like the book on Strindberg and Van Gogh,17 just as I had appreciated his famous statement: "We are not the exception, we think in the face of the exception." Now I am grateful to him not to have taken myself for the exception - which was probably not the case for Heidegger

• Do you recall what Heidelberg and Fribourg were like in those days? • In Fribourg Imet Landgrebe and Fink l8 and, in Heidelberg, Gadamer. But there were no exchanges between the French and German universities, and I was very disappointed that Strasbourg at that time, and for obvious political reasons, did not serve as a bridge with Germany, but rather as a moat. If you wanted to look to the other side of the Rhine, you had to be willing to make the effort. The fundamental problem was the reintegration of Alsace into France. My colleagues at the university, like the people of Alsace themselves, did not understand very well why anyone would be interested in what was happening on the other side of the border, and I perceived in them something resembling the mistrust that the French had shown towards Germany before the war. • When you resumed «normal life" in 1945, did you renew your prewar political ties? • Yes, I did renew these ties beyond captivity - but after receiving the terrible lesson of the war, which had invalidated my earlier judgments and forced upon me a kind of political reeducation. I sometimes found myself holding positions very similar to those I had had in 1934-6, rapidly developing a hostility to the socialism of Guy Mollet. My friendship with Andre Philip never wavered, and this was true until his death. I went to Paris to participate in congresses, colloquia; and in the years 1947 to 1950 I discovered the Esprit group, which I had not known well before the war because I was then much more involved in militant socialism and I considered the people at Esprit too intellectual. I became much closer to this journal, and I published in it. My


23

friendship with Emmanuel Mounier 19 grew deeper a short time before his death, which was a very great sorrow for me. I see myself, in 1950, in the garden of the "White Walls" in Chatenay-Malabry, not knowing that one day I would live here, and tears streaming down my face. The person of Mounier had truly won me over, not so much his ideas as himself. I had already been sufficiently shaped philosophically not to be one of his disciples; but I was nevertheless a companion of his. He himself was, moreover, in quest of a professional philosopher to lend him support; he had lost his "own" philosopher in the person of Landsberg20 and then of Gosset, executed as a member of the Resistance in Brittany. Mounier would have wanted me to follow in their steps, which I willingly accepted. He was very aware of the fact that he lacked the conceptual structure, that he was sometimes forced to improvise. He had tried to remedy the situation by writing during his exile in Dieulefit the Traite du caractere, which is his most solid work. It is a good book, but it borrows too much from characterology and remains somewhat summary on the conceptual plane.

• Among French philosophers, which one did you most feel the presence of? • Gabriel Marcel is by far the person with whom I maintained the deepest relationship, beginning in the year of my agregation, 1934-5, and again later, visiting him periodically up to his death in 1973. During his famous "Friday evenings," which I began to attend in 1934, a theme for discussion was chosen and the rule was always to start from examples, to analyze them, and to resort to doctrines only as a means of supporting the positions defended. There I tasted a kind of discussion that was entirely lacking at the Sorbonne. At Marcel's one had the impression that thinking was alive, that it was doing the arguing. Moreover, when one reads Gabriel Marcel one often has the feeling not of effusiveness, far from it, but of a constant dynamic approximation, spurred by the concern with finding the right word. We argued in this way every week, for two or three hours, very actively, having the audacity to think for ourselves, which compensated in large measure for the historical culture that was dispensed at the Sorbonne. I believe that this is what I fundamentally owe to him: to have dared to try to do philosophy and to do it in a situation assumed polemically - and this was, moreover, the kinship he saw between theater and philosophy. Many of his ideas are, in fact, expressed through characters on stage. His plays, whatever he may have thought of them, were not very good. He felt it unfair that Sartre was recognized but not him. Perhaps. today I would be equally critical of Sartre's theater ... I am

24


thinking of a fine essay by Father Fessard entitled Theatre et philosophie, that develops the idea that all the protagonists have a right to be heard - which does not mean that everyone is correct - since everyone can speak; this is what he calls "the superior justice of theater," which distinguishes, at least theoretically, didactic theater from true theater, where it is up to the spectator to draw a conclusion. Gabriel Marcel is half-way between these because he does put in the mouth of one of the characters the view he himself holds, but he also practices a sort of distribution of speech. The extreme attention that Gabriel Marcel paid to people was related to his experience in the First World War, where his work was to collect information about missing soldiers, to reconstruct individual destinies. I possess a portrait of him: he looks like a cat. He was a very funny, caustic man, who liked to tell stories. But he had an enemy: Sartre, who despised him, while Gabriel Marcel admired Sartre, although he was scandalized by him. Sartre was a constant object of scandal not only because of his atheism but also because he claimed that man was the nothingness of things. Gabriel Marcel could by no means accept this. Perhaps my slight interest in Sartre owes something to Gabriel Marcel, although I attribute it instead to my preference for Merleau-Ponty. I never stopped meeting periodically with Gabriel Marcel, up to the program organized in his honor at Cerisy a short time before his death. He was the same as always, acting like one of the participants, one among others. If I have moved away from his philosophy, it is not because of his deep convictions, but because of a certain lack, in him, of conceptual structure. His is fundamentally an exploratory thinking that slips from one concept to another, an idea playing the role of a melodic frame for a series of variations; thinking by conceptual affinity, where one idea is specified by a neighboring idea. I would not go so far as to call it associationist thinking, but it does proceed by means of assonances and dissonances. In general, the intellectual distances taken from him by his closest acquaintances by no means diminished the affection he had for them. When I wrote my book on Freud, I have to say, however, that he disavowed me. He told me very clearly that I had given in to what he called the "spirit of abstraction." And I understand his judgment better to the extent that now I would reproach myself for having constructed everything on Freud's most theoretical texts (chapter 7 of The Interpretation of Dreams, the writings of the Metapsychology, along with The Ego and the Id) and not having sufficiently confronted the experience of analysis as such: the desire that comes to speech, the relation with another and with the primary others, the passage by way of narrative, the repetition compulsion, the work of mourning. Instead I discussed concepts, which Gabriel Marcel hated.


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He used to say in particular: the cogito of Descartes guards the threshold of the valid against mystery. But I was always mistrustful of the idea of mystery when it would mean the prohibition of passing beyond a limit, in opposition to Kant's precept in The Critique of Judgement to "think more." It must not be forgotten, however, that Gabriel Marcel completed the opposition that he made between the mystery, which encompasses me, and the problem, which is before me, with a praise of second reflection, redoubling in a sense the first movement, which can only be a form of problematization. Anyway, that is what I insisted on emphasizing in him. Nevertheless, the fact that I moved from the problem of the symbol to the problem of metaphor to find a semiotic basis and an instrument of language that had been coded and known through the history of rhetoric, this amounted in his eyes to losing a certain thickness of the symbolic which was more important than its linguistic trace in the metaphorical. For myself, I thought that metaphor allowed me to treat the semantic core of the symbol. As for the systematic spirit Gabriel Marcel cautioned me about, I continue to claim it, even if it tends toward a certain didacticism, which is partially explained by the fact that all my work has been put to the test of my teaching. I confess that I have always needed order and, if I reject any form of totalizing system, I am not opposed to a certain systematicity. Gabriel Marcel and Mircea Eliade - of whom we shall speak - are two examples of men who had a strong influence on me in our relations of friendship, but I never submitted to the intellectual constraints of being their disciple. These men made me free. Perhaps I might have known the same q uali ty of exchange wi th Jean N a bert, 21 but he was not a man who maintained warm relationships. One year when he was in Brittany and I was as well, I decided to go and see him, and even to surprise him. I arrived mid-afternoon and found the garden open, the mail box filled with papers. I waited two hours, I even gathered some pansies that I replanted in my garden and which are still there. Then 1learned in the newspaper that he had been taken to the hospital, where he died. I had never dared to go and see him, and it was the day of his death that I did so. • While you were in Strasbourg, what were your relations with the Parisian philosophers? • I became Parisian only later, and so I escaped a lot of things: I never knew the milieu of Saint-Germain-des-Pres, I did not know Sartre personally. The only time I had a contact with him - in the years 1963-4, when I was working with the little philosophy group at Esprit

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- it was after the publication of Questions of Method, a book to which Mikel Dufrenne and I had devoted a year of discussion within the group. So we had invited Sartre and prepared twelve questions. To reply to the first one, he spoke for two and a half hours, and we were therefore unable to ask the second! Simone de Beauvoir was there, watching to see that everyone was paying close attention. In the controversies that opposed him to Camus and then to Merleau-Ponty, I was on their side. I also had a correspondence with Sartre over one of his plays that had deeply affected and scandalized me: The Devil and the Good Lord. I had written an article, to which he replied in a cordial and generous manner. This article, which today seems to me a little naive, can be found in Lectures 2.22 • Viewed from the provi11ces, how did the Paris of Saint-Germain-desPres appear to you?

• Like a superficial fable. This feeling also contained a strong antiParisian prejudice, reinforced by the intellectual climate of Chambonsur-Lignon, then of Strasbourg. But this experience immunized me, so to speak, againt the winds of fashion. As concerns Merleau-Ponty, I knew him when I was in Chambon-sur-Lignon in 1945-8; he was then teaching in Lyons and I met him there several times. I also ran into him in Louvain, at the home of Father van Breda, at the Husserl Archives in 1946-7, and at two colloquia: one of his lectures, "On the phenomenology of language" (1951),23 had made a profound impression on me. Since he had, in my opinion, perfectly marked out the field of the phenomenological analysis of perception and of its mechanisms, all that remained open to me - at least this is what I thought at the time - was the field of practice. It was here that I undertook investigations that were to find their subsequent development when I turned to the problem of evil, of bad will - what, in theological terms, is called "sin." I had the impression that in the area of phenomenology only the representative side of intentionality had been studied, and that the entire practical field, the emotional field, that is the field of feeling and of suffering - although I had greatly admired Sartre's book on the emotions - had not really been explored. My own choices appear to me today to have been determined in three ways: first of all, Merleau-Ponty had left open a field of investigation for which the tools of analysis were available; next, I had paid particular attention to the discussion between Descartes, Leibniz, Spinoza and Malebranche on the problem of freedom and determinism; finally, I had become involved with a problematic of Augustinian in-


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spiration concerning evil and sin, which had led me to the symbolism of evil. I came across some notes from captivity, written not by me but by someone who had taken down my courses almost word for word, and I was amazed to find to what extent I had anticipated what I would do later: they contained almost exactly the content of the Philosophy of the Will. The main structure had already been sketched out: the theme of the project and its motivation, then that of voluntary movement with the alternating cycle between habit and emotion, and finally the theme of consenting to necessity. In this way I was able to complete this dissertation very quickly, since I returned in 1945 and it was finished in 1948. There were, in truth, five years of reflections and teaching prior to this that formed its underpinnings. The choice of my area had been sketched out even earlier, as witnessed by a lecture I gave in Rennes atthe beginning of the war, while I was on leave: it was on attention considered as the voluntary orientation of the look. So I believe that my choice of the practical field dates back a long way: I had long admired Luther's treatise on the servile will, On Christian Freedom, as well as the great discussion in which he confronted Erasmus. Then the political context came to reinforce my orientation in the direction of these questions of freedom, evil, and responsibility. Even earlier, I believe that I felt great admiration for Greek tragedy, which puts the problem of destiny in the foreground. Nor would I deny the influence on me of my formative training in the Calvinist theology of predestination. The choice of my special area of study, the voluntary and the involuntary, is therefore strongly overdetermined.

• In 1956 you were appointed to the Sorbonlle and so you left Strasbourg . • I could have stayed there. But I belonged to that generation for whom the aim of a career was to reach Paris. I had been a candidate for the Sorbonne once before, presented by Hippolyte and the majority of the philosophy department, but the assembly elected Jean Guitton. The following year a chair came free and I was elected. I was very ill at ease at the Sorbonne; this is why I later chose Nanterre. I did not find there the ties with students that had existed at Strasbourg. For me, the Sorbonne was something like the negative of Strasbourg. It is true that the philosophy department of the Sorbonne was brilliant indeed: there was Raymond Aron, Georges Gurvitch, Vladimir Jankelevitch,Jean Wahl, Henri Gouhier, Georges Canguilhem, Gaston

28 From Valence to Nanterre Bachelard. And it is also true that I received great satisfaction from my teaching: the amphitheaters were full, the students were sitting on the windowsills to hear my courses on Hussed, Freud, Nietzsche, Spinoza in the years 1956-65. But, just because of their numbers, they were intangible; I did not know them and I was acutely aware that the university institution was entirely ill suited to this situation. In 1965 I took the initiative to put together an issue of the journal Esprit on the university, making a rather severe assessment that resulted in a number of proposals which resurfaced in 1968-9 (relating in particular to the appointment of professors by the college of the Sorbonne on the basis of criteria that were quite outmoded). You can still read these today, as I had them included at the end of Lectures 1, despite their predominently utopian character, for reasons of intellectual honesty, as I also have done in the same editorial framework for my notes on China and Israel,24 To return to my intellectual scruples, my disappointments and my projections concerning the university in the years before 1968, I had the impression that the task of creating a community of students and teachers was being entirely neglected. Nor did colleagues have any better relations among themselves. We merely crossed paths. There was no meeting place, outside of the occasions provided by the departmental meetings. We knew nothing of the life of our colleagues; we knew one another only as the author of one work or another. For example, I never met Mrs Aron, or Mrs Jankelevitch. There was no research conducted in common, no confrontations, no discussion. I had the impression of a sort of intellectual desert. What is more, not having been initiated into Parisian life, not being an alumnus of the Rue d'Ulm, I found myself in the midst of an environment where the dynamics had long been established. I felt like a foreign body there, working mostly for myself, although I did have the impression of enjoying a fair hearing from the students. It is true, however, that my main preoccupation was, instead, of a personal nature: how was I to resolve the contradictions created by my situation at the crossroads of two currents of thought which were not reconciled - philosophical critique and religious hermeneutics? Even more sharply defined, my problem was to determine whether what I was doing within the philosophical field was not a form of eclecticism, were I really to articulate my multiple allegiances originally and honestly: Gabriel Marcel, Hussed, Nabert, not to mention Freud and the structuralists. This problem of intellectual honesty has always been agonizing for me: not to forget my debt to a given line of inspiration, or to any other.


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• In the name of this intellectual honesty, in the sixties you tackled the Freudian corpus, as a way of putting your reflections on consciousness to the test of psychoanalysis. • The first reason for this work was really the question of culpability, since I had devoted volumes 2 and 3 of the Philosophy of the Wil/25 to human frailty-what I called "fallibility" in relation to culpability-and to the symbolism of evil, that is to say, to the passage from an analysis of the essence of the will to a symbolism of the myths expressing the figures and the genealogies of evil. I then found myself confronting a sort of residue, inaccessible to analysis and to the phenomenological method: infantile, archaic, pathological culpability. I was well aware that the entire field of culpability was not covered by the symbolism of evil illustrated by Greek tragedy, myths and biblical narratives, and that there was something else. The second reason was that I saw in psychoanalysis an alternative to phenomenology and, in a general manner, to the philosophies of consciousness. The fundamental limit of the Cartesian project, with its postulate of transparency, was always a problem for me. I finally took up again the motives that inspired Dalbiez, for whom psychoanalysis was a branch of the philosophy of nature: the philosophical study that takes nature into account in man. This involved a different perspective than that of the religious symbolism of evil - Christian or otherwise - and, moreover, an orientation unlike that developed by phenomenology. In starting to work on it, I thought I was writing an article on morbid culpability. As I applied to Freud my habit of reading the whole of his work, and as I treated him like a philosopher, like a classic, I ended up with a big book,26 which was also the occasion for a real internal debate, which today I would jokingly call a self-analysis on the cheap. This work did indeed help me to go beyond the somewhat obsessive and archaic side of the problem of culpability, which has been replaced in my work by the question of suffering, of excessive suffering that overwhelms the world. • When you decided to work on Freud long before he became fashionable, you must have been an isolated figure. • There were others though, Daniel Lagache, Didier Anzieu and Juliette Boutonier, who taught at the Sorbonne. But it is true that I was not influenced by them. My problematic was truly personal. Moreover, without being Popperian in any way, I have always been very attentive to the idea of "falsification," and I was asking myself what "falsifies" phenomenology. It is the main thrust of my investigation, whereas

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many people saw it as a sort of integration of psychoanalysis and phenomenology; on the contrary, I was confirming in my work that this could not be done, that something decidedly resisted it. Phenomenology does indeed have its other. In The Voluntary and the Involuntary27 the problem of the unconscious was treated in the context of what I had termed the "absolute involuntary," that is to say, that which is completely resistant to analysis just as it is to conscious mastery. I considered three figures of this absolute involuntary: character, the unconscious, and life (I mean the fact of being alive). Already in my work in 1948 the unconscious acted as the blind spot of self-consciousness, the blind spot that cannot be assimilated into consciousness, that is not a lesser consciousness but the other of consciousness - in this sense, I have always been very Freudian. • Was it during this same period that you made the acquaintance of Mircea Eliade? • I knew Henri Puech and Georges Dumezil, and it was through them that I met Mircea Eliade. His insatiable curiosity and inexhaustible generosity were something astounding. He was a sort of Pic de La Mirandole. 28 At fourteen he had already written on coleoptera and he possessed quite amazing collections of rare stamps. At the time I made his acquaintance he was teaching in Paris and giving a course under the direction of Puech and Dumezil. I had been struck by the singular nature of his first work, appearing under the title of Traite d'histoire des religions,29 whereas it was actually a study of religious patterns. As Dumezil's preface points out, this is a typological, structural analysis. Instead of following a historicist schema in the old perspective of the comparative history of religions - in which religions are classified, from the most primitive to the most developed, from an evolutionist perspective - he restructured his investigations around dominant themes, essentially great cosmic polarities: the sky, the waters, rocks, the wind, and so on, borrowing examples from different bodies of writings, practices, and rites. It was this antihistoricist approach that struck me. But it was as if this structural conception was stifled by an almost ideological obsession: the opposition of the sacred and the profane. As a result, the diversity of the figures of the sacred was crushed by a sort of monotony of preference, regardless of the cultural context, for the notion of the sacred and the polarity of sacred/profane; what might have been a strength from a methodological point of view in the idea of a diversified symbolism was as if diminished by it. He ended up making shamanism a privileged structure, and this imposed itself on the historical plane as the dominant paradigm. Eliade thought


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he was resisting historicism by affirming what he understood to be the permanence of the sacred. I believe that one must genuinely understand the importance this antihistorical aspect had for him: basically, the sacred was to be everywhere identical to itself, but this was at the cost of conceptual vagueness. The main problems that he finally encountered did not have to do with the content of his investigations but with the very evolution of the discipline: the idea of a science of religions that would be omniscient not only lost its prestige but became increasingly suspect. The specialists are unanimous in thinking that it is not possible to really know several religions at once, so that Eliade ended up being suspected of polymathy. And it was precisely to compensate for this accusation that he was led to reemphasize the organizing pole, that is to say, the polarity sacred! profane. I was well aware of the profound difficulty he confronted, in that he had to master an ever more abundant body of knowledge - even if one considers the Hindu domain alone, he had to make himself familiar with a corpus of several tens of thousands of pages It is unfortunate that Puech and Dumezil were unable to keep him in Paris, because if he had had the choice Eliade would have remained in France. But the University of Chicago, as soon as it could, offered him a position and he took it. The language he spoke at home was Romanian, his cultural language was French and all his books were written in French, English being only the language in which he taught. I do believe that he never published anything in English that was not translated from the French. He had been introduced to Sanskrit by Petazzonni and his Hindu masters; in addition, he had lived for two years in a Tibetan monastery, where he got to know and in some respects practiced, as a Westerner could, the ascetic and meditative disciplines. In this way he had acquired, from the inside, a knowledge of the wisdom belonging to the religions of the Orient .

• Was this a subject of discussion between you? • Yes, we talked especially about the possibility of inhabiting several different religious sites. For my part, I was rather reserved, having always had the feeling that just as one can have only very few friends, one cannot participate in several religions; I shared the mistrust of Merleau-Ponty, who, in another context, thought that one could not have an overview of the totality, and that one can therefore proceed only step by step. And what is more, I felt a great resistance to the opposition sacred/profane, linked to what I considered to be an abuse of symbolism; this had led me to prefer the notion of "metaphor" which presented a structure that seemed to me to be more manageable. There

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were basically three lines of discussion between us: first the relevance of the opposition between sacred and profane - I was more attentive to the opposition between saint and sinner; next, the possibility of an encompassing view - I had always been struck by the fact that the religious exists only in structured ensembles, just as language exists only in particular languages; finally, the role of the text, of writing. He thought that I overvalued the role of textuality in the production of meaning; for him, the textual level was if not superficial, at least a surface phenomenon in comparison with the depth created by the oral tradition and sentiment. Not without provoking resistance from the specialists, he thought that the religious sphere possessed autonomy and that it was autostructured by the predominance of the category of the sacred. Eliade held closely to the hypothesis of the immanent comprehension of the religious phenomenon: he defended the idea that this phenomenon is to be understood on its own terms, the specialist being obliged to inhabit the phenomenon under analysis, without taking any distance. At the present time, we are witnessing instead the revenge of the specialists. Even the chair of comparative history of religion at the Sorbonne has been split into different branches.

• Did he place himself within a religion? • He was originally Orthodox, and it is certain that the liturgical and pneumatological aspects of Orthodoxy, in opposition to Roman Catholicism and to Lutheran Protestantism, brought him closer to the thought of the Orient. He said to me very often: "Don't you see how the history of the Reformation roots it within the West in the constant forgetfulness of the Orient, and that it places itself in the wake of the great schism?" He himself was a dandy as a young man, quite detached from his religious roots; it was Hinduism that brought him back to his Romanian and Orthodox Christian sources, but in a synchretic form. The liturgical sense of Orthodoxy nevertheless allowed him to affirm that before doctrine comes belief, before belief the rite, before the rite the liturgy. My friendship for Eliade was deep and faithful. He was one of the Romanian trio in Paris, with Ionesco and Cioran. This trio is no more. The friendship between Cioran, Eliade and Ionesco was not an empty word, although their personalities were very different. They shared the same destiny, were very close and saw one another often. At the party in honor of Mircea's seventy-fifth birthday, -I recall, Ionesco asked him: "Do you remember when you were so much older than me at school?" While Ionesco was a humorist, Cioran was rather cynical; he loved, for example, to go to inaugurations because they were ridiculous. The last


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time I saw him was at a ceremony in front of the house where Gabriel Marcel had lived, 23 rue de Toumon; someone had set up a little stand on the sidewalk; but it had more or less fallen down and people were picking up pieces of it, while someone was reading the praises of the philosopher; people were passing by laughing, while Cioran observed the scene, laughing derisively.

• Among the other great philosophers you have known, which one has remained close to you? • Hans-Georg Gadamer, certainly, despite the geographical distance. I began as a reader of Gadamer, a great figure of the hermeneutic current. I had been involved in his old quarrel with the "first" Habermas, and I situated myself somewhat between the two of them, rejecting in particular the opposition between truth and method. 30 I have come to be more concerned with integrating in interpretation the moment of critique, that is, the human sciences, which Gadamer cast out in the direction of what he called method, but which in fact was a kind of methodicalism. Today, I give him greater credit, precisely, on the point of his hostility to Heidegger, who tended to treat him as a traitor to himself and to Husser!' As we see in his autobiography,3l Gadamer is very hostile to Heidegger's reading of Plato, construing Platonism as a dogmatic theory - theory of ideas, the opposition of the intelligible and the sensible, and so on. Gadamer was much more attentive to the incessant movement of the dialogues, which he saw not as rhetorical clothing, but as the very movement of thought, as its play. At the period when I was engaged in a debate with structuralism, I was led to part ways with Gadamer in order to look for a kind of median position between critique and the hermeneutics of appropriation since, for Gadamer, the hermeneutical enterprise consists essentially in attenuating, diminishing, if need be annihilating, distance, whether distance in time or distance in space; this is what I was resisting by holding that one does not know oneself, that one has to go by way of the detour of others, always valuing the detour of critique. The man is rather astonishing. His mind is steeped in poetry: he knows by heart all the German poetry he evokes immediately in conversation: Goethe, Schiller, Grillparzer, Stefan George, Paul Celano He also has profound knowledge of Greek tragedy. He actually lives in the texts, which he inhabits through recitation. There is in him something like a hermeneutics of the oral recitation of writing. Our relations are friendly, but I have often had the impression that he retained certain reservations, thinking that I was on Habermas's side. We had a somewhat stormy evening when I presented the Gifford

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Lectures 32 again in Munich in the autumn of 1986. He had come to hear me, and I was not really at ease because my German was not good enough for a discussion on equal terms with him; he himself gave a rather polemical turn to this meeting. Since then I have seen him again several times in Paris and in Germany. More recently I feel that my relationship with him has calmed down. And now that we are both moving off the world stage on tiptoe, we do so with a great amount of mutual affection. I had the great pleasure of participating in the celebration of his ninety-fifth birthday this year in Heidelberg and to give the "main address" at his invitation .

• Let us return, if you will, to the chronology. We left you at the Sorbonne, dissatisfied with the relations among teachers and the relations with students. When you were given the opportunity to go to teach at Nanterre, you said that you did not hesitate for a minute. • I knew nothing of the dealings that had preceded the founding of this university, which was an annex of the Sorbonne and which had no autonomous status but just an administrative council. The proposal descended on me without my knowing the ins and outs of it, or the nature of the plan. One day at the Sorbonne the Dean informed the professors that a new university was being created. There were three of us who agreed to go there - Pierre Grapin, Jean Beaujeu and myselfand we were each of us Dean in turn, with the success that you know. Grapin, the German scholar, was the first to take on this function. I had made his acquaintance both professionally and politically at Strasbourg - he was a communist, or close to the Communist Party, and I recall having taken part in joint meetings organized more or less under the auspices of the Peace Movement; not a very good reference! Between us there was a sort of left-wing proximity and my admiration for his work as a German scholar, devoted to Heine, as well as for his intellectual probity. As for myself, I especially wanted to leave the Sorbonne and to have an experience in which I could once again find a genuine contact with students. The first time I went to Nanterre, it was during the winter and the taxi driver refused to go all the way; there was so much mud the driver said to me: "Do you take my car for a landing craft?" I remember the burlesque scene of laying the first stone. Pierre Grapin and I transported this celebrated stone in a taxi, but we didn't know what to do with it. We put it down in the mud and we left. It is very curious that I did not realize what a desolate place it was. Perhaps I was taken with a certain working-class fantasy that made me think it was not so bad after all to build a university in the middle of the shantytowns.


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But in my eyes Nanterre represented a radical change from the Sorbonne and the Latin Quarter. I did not perceive its architectural ugliness, either. This completely astounds me today. Nanterre was created with a few little pieces of the Sorbonne and some professors from the provinces, including Mikel Dufrenne. We formed a philosophy department, and I was particularly proud to have succeeded in bringing in three philosophers who had not taken the agregation: Henri Dumery, with his ecclesiastical titles; Sylvain Zac, who had not been able to take the agregation because he had been excluded, as early as 1935, by the first laws of "protection" against foreign Jews, the laws requiring five years of naturalization in order to be a candidate for the agregation; Emmanuel Levinas, whom I had read, and who had been Mikel Dufrenne's colleague at Poi tiers. In addition there was a kind of automatic recruitment: a certain number of colleagues who had been expelled from Algeria were appointed without having been elected. They were warmly welcomed. But we had no autonomy since the election of professors still depended on the Sorbonne. I had two happy academic years: 1966-7 and 1967-8, very fruitful, very happy years. There were not many students, which allowed us to know them better and to follow them in their development. We remained longer at Nanterre than today and we willingly spent the entire day there. For me, it was a way of finding the atmosphere of Strasbourg in Paris. I had always had in my mind the idea of a community of teachers and students, which had led me, moreover, to support the plan of incorporating students in the university councils I now believe that it was a serious mistake: being a student is not a profession. The Anglo-Saxon system is much better, where there are very solid student organizations but ones which negotiate from the outside and which, finally, have much greater weight than if they were lost in the administrative councils - where, anyway, nothing important is decided, at least not then, since everything was determined on the ministerial level.

• In 1968 you were a professor and the head of the philosophy department. You were there when the "events," as we say, began . • The events started in Nanterre on the basis of questions outside the sphere of teaching, such as the right for the young men to visit the girls in their residences; at bottom, it was the "sexual revolution" that was its detonator. Nanterre suffered from two handicaps: the first had to do with the choice of disciplines presented -letters on the one hand, law and economics on the other, along with political science; since the students of letters included a strong leftist faction and the students of

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law an active right, their confrontation was inevitable. The second handicap had to do with the geography of student recruitment: on one side, bourgeois, from the residential suburbs of Neuilly and from the sixteenth and seventeenth arrondissements; on the other, working class, from Nanterre and the other, less wealthy suburbs. The sons and daughters of the bourgeois were leftists; the others, communists, were very attached to the proper functioning of the institution - for them, the university was still .raditional way of rising, offering knowledge and the prospect of social success. On the side of the bourgeois, however, it was felt that the university was no longer a privileged factor in social ascension. Since their parents had already conquered these positions, the young bourgeois could ally themselves with those who found themselves at the university without any real means of succeeding there and could dream only of destroying the instrument which was no longer, for them, a reliable means to future success. When I became Dean in March 1969, I benefited from two ideological supports, so to speak: the anti-leftist communists and the socially committed Catholics; my adversaries, paradoxically, were the traditionalist bourgeois and the leftist bourgeois.

• What judgment did you make in 1968 on what was happening? • At the time, it was positive; I thought that the positive outweighed the negative; the experience of freedom of speech, the fact that everyone was talking with everyone else, all the aspects of conviviality seemed extraordinary to me. Today I wonder what really happened .. Nothing or a great deal? Was it a sort of great waking, playful dream, as Raymond Aron thought, or did something important really happen which may have had no political results but which had profound cultural significance, bringing to light as it were everything that had been covered over, hidden, everything that had been held back - a sort of liberation, a social eruption? Why did this occur simultaneously throughout the world, in Paris, Tokyo, Berlin and on American campuses? The sole common element, it seems to me, is the rapid demographic growth, beyond the control of an institution that was elitist in its origin and which found itself very rapidly having to obey a more popular objective, incapable of readjusting its elitist structure to its new function of the general distribution of knowledge. This is the only factor I can see that is absolutely common to the four university systems most strongly affected. In addition to that, the changes in behavior, distinct yet convergent, manifested the massive rise of an age group whose dreams of emancipation were thwarted by a real economic and financial dependence, which was to worsen after this.


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• That is true. But in France the phenomenon went far beyond the universities. • Yes, because the students succeeded in mobilizing the labor unions. But, at the same time, I believe that they did not see that the unions controlled the situation much better than they did and knew when not to go too far. Incidentally, what was not understood atthe time was the moderation of the police. It has been said that they were violent, whereas in reality they showed extraordinary tact; no one was killed, which is amazing, considering the number of people present in the demonstrations and the number of demonstrations.

• When did you have the impression that things were escaping your jurisdiction? • After the return of General de Gaulle, May 31, 1968. Before that, there had been a political plan, a little crazy perhaps but not incoherent, which rested on the idea that institutions formed a chain, that the university formed the weak link in this chain, and that from the weak link to links that were not as weak all the dominoes would finally fall. Now the day General de Gaulle took things in hand again, there was no longer a viable political plan in opposition, there was only a plan to sabotage the institution. This is what I inherited in 1969 when I was elected Dean. I had before me a will to disorder that was no longer grounded in any political motivation, that was based only in a local motivation of disfunction - preventing the university from functioning. The margin for discussion was, therefore, extremely slim. In 1969 the situation had deteriorated, with no political plan except a purely ideological confrontation, where power was immediately identified with violence and denounced blatantly as such.

• Was your election as Dean a unanimous one? • I was elected in a simply astonishing manner. I had participated with groups of professors, assistants, and students in many decisions, discussions, and more or less utopian projects for recreating the university. Rene Remond and myself had been placed in competition without ever having been candidates, for the sole reason that he had left the independent union and I, the SNESUP (Syndicat National des Enseignants du Superieur): for various reasons, neither of us accepted the discipline of the unions; I was elected by the provisional administrative council, which at that time included professors, assistants, and students. I had voting for me the quasi-unanimity of the students, the

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majority of the asssistants, and the minority of the professors. I considered that it was my duty to accept, but I did so on the condition of choosing my principal assistant, which was Rene Remond. Those who had elected me were upset because Rene Remond had had the majority of the professors for him. But we always acted in unison. Rene Remond, moreover, wrote a very fine bookB in which he recounts the entire history of Nanterre. He displayed absolute loyalty in regard to my choices, even when he disapproved of them, reproaching me, for example, for being overly patient with the leftists.

• In sum, according to you, 1969 was very different from 1968, in that the aggressiveness of the students was resolutely focused on the professors. • The year 1969 saw something like a rejection of knowledge. I recall that once I was dragged into a large amphitheater to explain myself. "What do you have that we don't?" someone asked me. I answered, "I've read more books than you." This rejection made no distinction between knowledge and power, and power was reduced to violence, so that nothing that had anything to do with a vertical relation could be lived honestly.

• You remained Dean about a year; then, in 1970, you resigned. The events that preceded your resignation have inspired many commentaries and legends. Could you tell us about the events and, in particular, the manner in which the police moved onto the campus? • I would very much like to correct a historical point concerning the arrival of the police at Nanterre, because the interpretation that has been given was shameful for me. I was summoned one evening by the Minister, Guichard, at the height of the crisis, after my administrative council had voted, in their distress, in favor of a text stating that order on campus could no longer be maintained and that we retained only the sovereign responsibility for the safety of the buildings. The very evening of this vote, the Minister said to me: "Order must be restored, this cannot continue." I returned home and at midnight his general secretary called me back: "Tomorrow morning at seven o'clock, the police will be on the campus." I answered that he could not do such a thing. "Yes," he said. "You voted yesterday to release the campus from your authority. You renounced your authority, so we are stepping in." And this is how I found the police on the site. I did not call them, they were already there. Recently Rene Remond said to me: "What is extraordinary is that all


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that was illegal. We had no right to vote on a text of that nature, and, what is more, it had not been ratified by any competent authority." That is to say, I was in fact, without being aware of it, still the person responsible for maintaining order on the campus, our vote of renunciation being invalid. I reacted by choosing the worst possible solution: forbidding the police to enter the buildings. The police did not go in, except on a few occasions against my will. It was the worst solution because the police surrounding the buildings were bombarded with typewriters, tables, and so on, and I genuinely feared that there would be deaths. Nanterre was sacked for three days. A week later, I resigned.

• Looking back on it now, how do you interpret your resignation? • I would say that my failure at Nanterre was the failure of an impossible plan to reconcile self-management and the inherently hierarchical structure of any institution; or, in any case, the asymmetrical distribution of the distinct roles that it implies. But it is perhaps the basis of the question of democracy to manage to combine the vertical rela tion of domination (to use Max Weber's terminology) and the horizontal relation of shared lived experience - to reconcile Max Weber and Hannah Arendt. My fundamental failure is to have wanted to reconstitute the hierarchical relation on the basis of the horizontal relation. In this regard, the episode of the deanship has borne fruit in my subsequent reflections on politics. At a deeper level, I believe that it produced in me - in a lasting way -an unstable mixture made up of a utopian dream of self-management and the very precise, very positive experience of the American university campus, to which would have to be added the German university, which formed an intermediary reality. I have always found myself caught between nonviolent utopia and the feeling that something irreducible subsists in the relation of commanding, of governing; this is what I rationalize now as being the difficulty of joining together an asymmetrical relation and a relation of reciprocity. When, by duty or by mandate, one is the bearer of the vertical relation, one continually seeks to give this a legitimacy drawn from the horizontal relation; this legitimation, in the end, is fully authentic only if it allows the asymmetry tied to the vertical institutional relation to disappear; yet this vertical relation cannot completely disappear because it is irreducible - the agency of decision can never perfectly correspond to the ideal representation of a direct democracy, where each and every person would actually participate in every decision. Do we not observe on the juridico-politicallevel that the true problems of justice are not those of equal distribution but those posed by inegalitarian distributions? And

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the question finally amounts to determining what are the least unjust inequalities. Inegalitarian distributions are the daily bread of the governing of institutions of all sorts. This is the problem I find again today in Rawls and in the various theories of justice. But it was a great apprenticeship to have tried this and failed. In trying to understand the reason for my failure, in making more specific the anatomy of the institution, I became better aware of the squaring of the circle proper to politics: the impossible dream of combining the hierarchical and the convivial; such is, for me, the labyrinth of politics.

Chapter 2

France/United States: Two Incomparable Histories

• Two weeks after resigning from Nanterre, you left for Chicago. It has often been concluded that it was because you were disappointed with the experience of Nanterre that you went to teach in the United States. • Tha t is sheer fiction. I had been teaching on a regular basis in the United States - for six weeks, a trimester, a semester, even for an entire year - since 1954. 1 At the beginning, I did not speak English fluently; I became bilingual at the expense of the students I had the first year! Some still remember this My first stay, as I have already mentioned, was at the Quaker college of Haverford, near Philadelphia, where I had been introduced by American Quakers who had come to help out with the Protestant college at Chambon-sur-Lignon. Before speaking of my many years of teaching at Chicago, allow me to go back to this first American experience. In entering the American system through the Quaker side, I encountered it in its most tolerant form. Even the word "tolerant" is too weak to express the systematically pluralistic nature of the Quaker spirit, the credit each person is deliberately given regarding the capacity to find his or her truth, share of spirit or spark of meaning; tolerance is elevated here to the level of a genuine religious conviction. This spirit of conviviality, of fraternity, coloured not only the everyday relations between teachers and students, but also collegial relations, and relations among students. My experience with the Quakers is clearly marked in my memory: I remember, for instance, the burial of a philosopher colleague and the incredible simplicity of the ceremony, in contrast with all the rituals of

42 France/United States: Two Incomparable Histories American funerals: the man was wrapped in a shroud and placed directly in the earth, without a casket, and with perfect tranquility. I also recall the Thursday meeting, which, although not mandatory, was nevertheless well attended by the students. It was a time of meditation; anyone could have the floor to say whatever occurred to them or to read a religious text; this was not necessarily a Biblical text, it could be an Eastern text, but it could also be a passage from a novel or lyrical work, all of this in accordance with the spirit of syncretic spirituality which they embodied.

• How did you enter the University of Chicago? • I was made a doctor honoris causa at this university in 1967, along with Raymond Aron and Claude Levi-Strauss, and the Divinity School had chosen me to succeed Paul Tillich2 in the John Nuveen Chair. I was quickly coopted by the philosophy department and by the Committee on Social Thought, an interdepartmental institution founded by Hannah Arendt, whom I met at the home of Paul Tillich, to whom she was very close.

• The change from the Quaker college to the New York Union Seminary and, especially, to Yale, where for the first time you were involved in postgraduate teaching, must have represented a complete transformation of your working conditions. • The Quaker university was only a four-year college, whereas Yale indeed included graduate school. The very prestigious universities in the United States are characterized by a small undergraduate college and a large graduate school that confers the Master of Arts (M.A.) and the Master of Science (M.Sc.), then the Ph.D. (Doctor of Philosophy, following a terminology inherited from the eighteenth century). In reality, the actual end of the system in these prestigious universities is the doctorate; and when a student cannot go that far, it happens that he or she is given the Masters as a consolation prize. This is not the case in the average university. The University of Chicago, for example, is a doctoral factory, flanked by a very small college, which serves it as a breeding ground, and this, in turn, is preceded by an experimental-type secondary school from which it draws a few of its students, groomed for its college.

• Were the children of your colleagues among your students? • Most of the American university professors do not want their

France/United States: Two IncomparabLe Histories

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children to remain in their own university; they prefer to send them to the other side of the continent to finish their studies. This is, moreover, how the Americans avoid generational conflicts: at eighteen years of age, it is usual for a student to cross the entire country to go to college. This is part of the customary joke: they say that the student leaves with a refrigerator, a girlfriend or boyfriend, and a checkbook and returns home only at Thanksgiving, which is still the big family holiday.

• You speak of the American coLLege, but this has nothing to do with what we call the "college" in France. • The college constitutes what, to my mind, is best in the American system. It is an institution of higher learning that spans four years; it takes young people from eighteen to twenty-two and corresponds more or less to what in France would be the end of secondary school and the beginning of higher education. When one thinks of the American educational system, one usually thinks of the great universities - of Harvard, Berkeley, Stanford - but its greatest strength is to have created the institution of the college. College is necessary to make up for the relative weakness of secondary education, which in the United States is very uneven and, in any case, clearly inferior to European instruction. It allows the young Americans to make up for their delay in intellectual maturity in relation, for example, to French students. At eighteen they really begin to blossom and they display a thirst for learning that is incomparably greater than anything one finds in French students after they have taken the baccalaureat. I may add that the proportion of young people enrolled in college is considerable: up to the 1990s, a higher number of American twenty-year-olds were in school than among their French counterparts. A large number of secondary students go on to college and receive undergraduate training, while only one in four or five students continues to graduate studies.

• What do you think are the advantages of this system? • Its superiority over ours involves two things. First, the student is left with a very wide freedom to choose direction. In the first year, one has to choose five courses - each course represents three hours of instruction - but one is able to select whatever combination one wants. In the third year, the program of studies has to include a major and a minor. In this way, many students, whatever their major may be, and even if it is far removed from letters, or as they say there, "humanities," choose

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philosophy as a minor. And this explains why philosophical studies are doing very well in the United States: the three associations of university professors of philosophy (Eastern, Central and Pacific divisions of the American Philosophical Association) include more than fifteen thousand members. In second place, the institution of the seminar must be mentioned. Alongside the large introductory courses on different subjects, colleges organize seminars, and their numbers increase as the student advances through the curriculum and the choices become more specific. In highquality colleges, there are fewer than twenty participants in the seminars; students are obliged to contribute to the work by giving an oral presentation and by writing papers, which are more or less the equivalent of what in France we call a dissertation. The choice of the paper topic is usually negotiated in terms of the common program or the subject profile of the seminar, but also in terms of the interests of the student and the contents of other courses or seminars chosen. In addition to the seminar, there is also a tutorial, following the British or Scottish model, in which the professor will give direct comment and guidance focused on a paper read by the student on an agreed subject; this reading is followed by an hour's discussion during which it is decided what the next step will be. In other words, the student completes a course which is settled in relation to the choice made at the beginning, but which is also adjusted step by step. From one meeting to the next, the professor gives the student numerous readings to cover, on which comment is then to be made. The reading capacity of certain students is absolutely astonishing: you give them dozens of pages of Hegel to read during the week; when they return, not only is the reading done, but it is done with unbelievable care.

• Is the British heritage noticeable? • The memory of Oxford and Cambridge has remained very clear; but also that of the Scottish universities, whose mark is particularly felt in certain places, in Chicago, for instance. Don't forget that even after the Civil War the American patricians - whether the great Bostonian businessmen or the Southern plantation owners - continued to send their children to Oxford or Cambridge, and they returned imbued with a very classical culture. This is what explains, let me say in passing, why so many small American towns have Greek names: there are no fewer than six Athens in the United States, and just about the same number of Syracuses! New influences were felt in the 1930s, when Jewish refugees from Germany began to arrive; then a sort of synthesis occurred, especially on the East coast, between the Anglo-Scottish


45

heritage and that of the German university, carrying the acknowledged stamp of the Jewish intelligentsia. • When you arrived in the United States and began to teach there, were you immediately won over? • To begin with I was dazzled by the teaching system and by the relations among colleagues, before reaching a more moderate, more critical view and seeing its shadows. It is true that the campuses are like a bubble within American society: the difficulties of real life, the struggle to find a position in society are very attenuated there; the university environment thus seems ultra protected. The good side of this privileged condition is that it allows the development of a critical and speculative activity which a large number of students enter into with great pleasure. At first, I was more than a little surprised to see in them such a rapture of discovery, such an appetite for reading; the libraries are full until midnight, even later if that is possible. You have to understand that the campus offers the students a complete living environment; many of them visit their family only once or twice a semester or trimester. For the professors, this system is a double-edged sword. On the one hand, much more is demanded of them than in France; they must show an effective presence on campus for a certain number of hours per week, in particular, several hours a week during which they meet with students. These are known as office hours: the professor posts the hours when he or she is available and the students sign up. Some, of course, require more guidance than others. Some are very jealous of their autonomy. But, anyway, you have to be there. Moreover, American university professors are in the habit of working on site. Professors have their office and their personal library at the university, not at home. French professors often find it hard to conform to these rules, they are used to working at home. That is why they are sometimes considered less committed than their American colleagues. But the other side to this servitude lies in the quality and quantity of the services offered by the administration to the teachers, which, on the whole, frees up an appreciable number of hours from drudgery, and shelters them from material cares. Most of the professors have an assistant, a secretary or a share of secretarial support, to say nothing of the wealth of the libraries and the ease of access - so different from the library use to which French university professors are condemned and, alas, have grown accustomed!

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• Were you pleased with this way of life with the students, with this proximity to them? • I keep coming back to my myth of Strasbourg: after my departure, and I have to say, after my disappointment with the Sorbonne, I found there the practices I had known a little in Strasbourg. In particular, I have always been astonished by the very subtle mixture of familiarity and respect in the relations that the students have with their professors. Even in the 1970s, at a time when their relations with the institution were the rnost strained, they always maintained their sense of a vertical acknowledgment without forfeiting the horizontal dimension of conviviality. American students seem to rne to have the consummate art of guiding themselves in these subtle, delicate relations. Of course, one always encounters certain extreme cases, students who want to share their problems with you and who talk to you about the boyfriend or girlfriend who left them: one then has to forestall the confessional mode sornewhat and attempt to move the emotions to a rnore discursive level. It is true that one often sees in young Americans of eighteen or twenty a marked discordance between their prolonged adolescence on the affective level and an astonishing intellectual vivacity, between their emotional immaturity and their extreme intellectual maturity. This discordance tends to come out in their style of writing: in the midst of perfectly constructed arguments, kinds of puffs of sentimentality suddenly appear; and this occurs all the way up to the predoctorallevel.

• What do you think causes this emotional immaturity? • First of all, the fact that during their secondary education they have not benefited from sufficient intellectual stimulation; all of a sudden, they have to make up for this lag. Then one must realize that a large majority of families are second- or even first-generation immigrants. In American society one does not find the features of the old French citizenship. So the students find themselves, at the end of adolescence, confronting the difficulty of working out a compromise between their new status of intellectual and their cultural heritage, which remains very strong, especially in the case of the Hispanic families and, even now -at least from the 1960s to the 1980s-ofItalianor Irish families as well. To say nothing of the blacks - previously called Negroes, then colored people, and who now prefer to be called African-Americans.

• Were you immediately aware of the magnitude of the problem for the blacks?


47

• The middle of my years in America coincided with the great advances of civil liberties and with the struggle led by Martin Luther King Jr. In the North things were not experienced in the same way as in the South, where the taboos had to be shattered. One should not overlook this difference between the South and the North: historically, American blacks long remained slaves in the South, while this was not so in the North. But after this, the slaves from the South became the proletariat of the North, often even more destitute in this merciless society than they had been in the patriarchal system of the plantations, where on occasion they benefited from a benevolent order. In the industrial society of the North, they fell into the most total abandonment. With regard to the universities and their policy concerning blacks, it is not an exaggeration to call it a disaster. The thirty or fifty greatest universities have never succeeded in integrating blacks in significant numbers. The reason is terribly simple: they suffer the worst primary and secondary education; they are the primary victims of the incredible inequalities in standards between schools. A large number of them live in lone-parent families and are raised by single mothers; onto the economic disaster is grafted a cultural one. To this is added the fact, which continues to worsen, that those blacks who achieve success immediately leave their original neighborhoods. In Washington and other large American cities, there is no lack of extremely rich black doctors or lawyers; but they do not live in black neighborhoods, they live in white neighborhoods. So what one finds is a community whose best and brightest are constantly skimmed off, a community that is unceasingly beheaded of the elements that could contribute to giving it a new physiognomy. Blacks who have succeeded rarely involve themselves in educational activities on behalf of their own people; in this way the black community is massively abandoned to its sad lot. To give you an example, I do not recall having had a single black student at Haverford; perhaps a few at Yale, certainly many more at Columbia, if only because the university is located uptown, just south of Harlem. It wasn't until I went to Chicago, which has a huge black population, that I was able to measure the full extent of the problem. • The American secondary school does not play its role of integration. • It is certainly in this area that there is the most notable lag in the United States, because of the very fragmentation of the educational system. They have nothing comparable to the work that has been done in Europe, and especially in France, on the establishment of a national educational system. In the United States there is nothing equivalent to

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our Ministry of Education. Each state has the primary responsibility for education, despite the adjustments made by the federal system.

• In addition, the American system is fee-paying; studies are very expensive, and this contributes to widening the disparities. • It is the lower-middle-class students who suffer most from this system because, being neither rich nor poor, they have difficulty obtaining scholarships and the cost of enrolling in the university inflicts a great hardship on them. It is true that this constraint is relatively well ingrained in the American mentality; it is taken for granted that education is expensive for families; even in the state universities enrollment is expensive, far beyond anything we are used to in France. For this reason, as soon as a child is born, parents begin saving for the university education of their offspring. It is also true that in order to offset this great handicap, there are many scholarships financed by private foundations and by industrial benefactors. I recall having a student at Chicago who had received a scholarship from an oil company. One may wonder why oil companies would be interested in a philosophy student. The answer is simple: by distributing lots of money, in a random manner, but to young people who show notable intellectual aptitudes, there is the chance that one of them one day may win a Nobel Prize. In any event, a poor student who has managed to show talent in secondary school is sure to find money to go all the way to the end of graduate studies. It would be unfair not to underscore this point. Moreover, the United States offers the singular example of a society in which, at all levels, nonmarket relations to money coexist with the most implacable system of profitability. The most obvious example of this is the place of volunteer work in American society: Americans devote the most time to nonremunerative activities, in churches, in innumerable cultural associations - museums, concerts, British-style clubs, etc. - in hospitals, sports clubs. This is something the French have a hard time understanding; I myself continue to find it unfathomable that there is this juxtaposition in one and the same society of the most widespread generosity and the most rigorous economic calculation.

• What was the content of your teaching il1 the United States? • At the university a professor can negotiate the theme of his teaching with the department head. In this way, I was invited to Chicago to give a voice to what in the United States is called "continental philosophy"

France/United States: Two Incomparable Histories 49 and which goes from Kant and German idealism to Levinas and Derrida, passing by way of Nietzsche, Husserl, and Heidegger. I was also able to give courses on other periods in the history of philosophy, as I had done in Strasbourg. In addition, I had the luck to choose the subject of my courses, thanks to the liberalism of the university institution. As a result of this, from the 1960s and 1970s on, my books were almost always "tried out" on my American students in the form of seminar courses before being written; the other side of the coin is that these works have perhaps retained an overly didactic form. At Chicago, the department of philosophy did not extend a very warm welcome to the type of philosophy I embodied; most of the teachers were logicians, representatives of logical positivism. I was rather the black sheep. But it was finally accepted that someone was needed to talk about Hegel. . and to make the bridge with historians, political scientists, and legal scholars. One of the interesting experiences I had at Chicago was teaching in pairs: the professors reply to one another in turn; or they share the same course, which they conduct as an open discussion. The students adore seeing two of their professors amicably opposing one another. I recall having taught the Critique ofJudgement with an excellent Kantian who had an "analytical" orientation. I learned a lot, moreover, about how the history of philosophy is taught by analytical philosophers, with a constant concern to strengthen the arguments of the text to the point where they are invulnerable; if there is anything comparable to this approach in France, it would be the work of Martial Gueroult. 3 At the Divinity School team teaching was almost the rule: there would be, on one hand, a theologian and, on the other, someone more speculative, or maybe a specialist in the history of religion .

• How would you translate "Divinity School" • I would say "school of religious sciences" since the instruction at the Divinity School includes several fields: biblical exegesis - Old and New Testament - comparative history of religions, Christian theology, Jewish studies, philosophy, psychology, and, finally, literature and religion - the latter forming a very flourishing field, in which two sorts of questions are examined: the influence of religion on literature, and the fact that literature potentially contains questions of an ethicoreligious character. My own teaching was situated between philosophy and theology, and was bizarrely entitled "Philosophical Theology"; that was the name of Tillich's chair. What I say elsewhere about the way in which I conceive of the relations between philosophy and theology indeed contradicts the title of the chair. But no one attached any

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constraints to this title, which I found upon arriving at Chicago. Anyway, my other two affiliations, with the department of philosophy and with the Committee on Social Thought, authorized me to conduct my teaching as I saw fit.

• Who were your students? • I had two kinds: on the one hand, the students enrolled in the Divinity School or in the philosophy department; on the other hand, students who had a double enrollment - for instance, attending my courses on epistemology or the philosophy of history, or on political philosophy, were students from the history department or the political science department. One of the most brilliant of these, Jeffrey Barash, has in the meantime become our colleague in France: he came from the history department, where he was the student of Leonard Krieger, the great specialist on Leopold Ranke and the German historical school, who had created in his own department a subsection of the history of ideas; it was here, and not in philosophy, that a student could hear of Hegel and Heidegger. • So your students knew nothing of the history of philosophy? • This was not so for the graduate students, the doctoral candidates. They often came from the better colleges, where they had received good instruction in the history of philosophy. I note in passing that the preparation for the doctorate in the great universities requires long and extensive study, covering several fields related to the topic of the dissertation; a series of examinations called "comprehensive" sanction these peregrinations into varied and sometimes distant territories. To this one must add that despite the strong opposition between "analytical" philosophy and so-called "continental" (that is, European and not British) philosophy, one philosopher at any rate remains common to both traditions: Kant. But it is not exactly the same Kant. The" analytical" one is the philosopher of the categorial structure of the understanding, detached from the transcendental deduction, especially in the second version of the Critique of Pure Reason, the latter considered a "subjectivist" concession, even a fall into psychologism. In this way, one has a Kant stripped of the transcendental subject, a "depsychologized" Kant, to employ their terms. The Kant of P. F. Strawson4 is a prime example of this.

• The American students, you said, stay on the campus and leave it


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only now and then to visit their families. But when you were at Chicago, did you make excursions off campus? • I actually know very little of the heart of America; I know almost nothing of the worlds of lawyers or doctors; I do not know the business world, the world of the influential. Despite numerous trips, for meetings, lectures, or simply for pleasure, I never really knew much outside of the campus and its surroundings. The country is incredibly vast; it is an entire continent, soaking up its own news and, as a result, showing little interest in the rest of the world and, on the whole, not knowing it very well. I remember that someone once asked me - this was in the fifties - "Finally, who did they give Strasbourg to? To the Swiss? To Luxembourg?" Having said this, you used the word "excursion. This is quite precisely the appropriate word to express what happens when one drives across even the city of Chicago. Chicago stretches along Lake Michigan for over forty kilometres from north to sOllth. Crossing the city amounts to a taste of the exotic: from one neighborhood to the next, you visit the Italian district, the Polish district, the Slovak, the Ukrainian districts, and so on, not to mention Chinatown. The stores often displa y signs in two languages. These phenomena of distinctive identity have become even more marked in recent years. Do they imply, at any rate in the North of the United States, a risk of dissolution? I don't think so. Because the factors of integration remain strong: I am thinking in particular of the practices of work and leisure that have an enormous power of equalizing the living conditions of individuals. This has to be stressed: American society is a merciless leveler. I recall the strong impression made on Tocqueville in his day by what he characterized as the "equality of conditions." On the other hand, when the demand for separate identity becomes a mass phenomenon, as in the case of the Hispanics in the South, then the threat of disintegration is serious. Miami is in the hands of the Cubans; the mayor of the city is himself Cuban. It is a bizarre reversal that takes me back fifteen years, when people used to say: "Cuba is an island that does not exist: its population is in Miami, its government in Moscow, its army in Angola." Many things have changed since then; what remains, unfortunately, is the destruction of the cities - often there is nothing at the heart of the cities but offices and the poor!

• People often say that the Hispanics have surpassed the blacks in social success.

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• And this has happened despite the disadvantage of language. Sociologists attach the greatest importance, and they are surely correct, to the fact that the fabric of the Hispanic family is very strong, while the black family has totally disintegrated. This is a consequence, it is said, of slavery: women and men were often separated on the plantations, and families had already been dislocated at the time of the transfer from Africa to the New World. So, when the blacks from the South emigrated towards the large industrial cities of the North, families were already shattered and were never truly reconstituted. To this must be added the retreat of the ideology of integration. After the civil rights period, marked by the movement of whites in the direction of blacks, Americans are now in a phase of retrenchment, where the norm becomes once again group identification. And unfortunately, this state of affairs is now having grafted onto it all the ideologies of difference which have become so powerful, and which serve to consolidate the differences that already exist: "They are different, just as we are different; that is their culture and this is ours." This is the type of discourse that tends to predominate. I have witnessed this development at Chicago during the past few years: in the cafeterias on the campus, blacks congrega~e more and more often among themselves, without mixing with whites, who themselves accept this and seem to find it normal. From the melting-pot society, people are going back to a fragmented society, playing upon the cultural redefinition of minorities. It is probable that the Hispanic phenomenon accentuates this movement and this is equally true for other groups, including those of Slavic origin In Chicago, every neighborhood has its national holiday: on these occasions you see Slovaks in Slovakian costumes, Poles in Polish costumes, and so on. The city is divided up into ethnic pieces. I myself, as one who has always felt very cosmopolitan, always feeling at home in three cultures, French, German, Anglo-Saxon, was taken by surprise by this American phenomenon of magnifying ethnic differences. It is true that I am also speechless in the face of what is happening today in Europe: I cannot believe that we are in the process of giving in to these paroxysmic displays of ethno-cultural identity coming from another age.

• Is this to say that you are opposed to what in the United States is called "multiculturalism?" • The question is not posed in the same way for all societies. With respect to American society, one has to remember that it is the only one made up of emigres; if only for that reason it cannot be compared to any


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other. The fragmentation of the United States has nothing to do with that of the Balkans, where one returns to a situation prior to the three great factors of assimilation resulting from the Ottoman empire, the Austro-Hungarian empire, and the Soviet empire. Take the map of the Balkans: it is as though one had emptied out a little pack of Hungarians here, a little pack of Czechs here, a little pack of Croats there The map of the United States presents nothing comparable: American emigration has been geographically dispersed with the movement westward. Moreover, until the competition of Spanish in recent years, English has been the common language of integration. And finally the three major religions to which Americans belong, Catholicism, Protestantism, and Judaism mix people together on a basis other than their ethnic origin. Islam, which has made a more recent breakthrough, poses an entirely new problem in this regard. What is currently called "multiculturalism" consists in a positive reevaluation of the ethnic and familial past going back two or three generations .

• Let us take things from the other side: where is the American melting pot found today? • First, you have to remember that professional affiliations are in no way marked by cultural origin; the market economy is based on this. In addition, the university, through the integrative character of campus life, also acts as a factor of homogenization. But it is especially the society of production, with its absolutely imperative models of consumption, and the almighty power of advertising that bring about integration. If I am sometimes tempted to evaluate the phenomena of multiculturalism in a positive light, it is in reaction to the merciless leveling of the society of production, consumption, and leisure that characterizes the United States. I can think of another element of integration: sports, as it is practiced there in a way that has nothing to do with sports here. American football, baseball, and basketball are the occasion for great festivities on campus. Moreover, the great teams are university teams. There are even universities that can almost be said to specialize in sports: students enroll in them because they are good at sports, even if they are less well qualified in other subjects. The University of Notre Dame, which is an excellent Catholic university, has one of the finest football teams. An important game is a festive occasion for everyone: students, professors, inhabitants of the city, everyone comes. At New Haven, the small town next to Yale University, where there is a good deal of tension between the academics - students and professors - and the citizens - town and

54 France/United States: Two Incomparable Histories gown - everyone turns out for the games, in the midst of majorettes and an atmosphere of jubilation. One never sees scenes of violence there like those we know in Europe .

• Did you witness the birth of «political correctness?" • I did actually see the beginning of it without really understanding the phenomenon. It seems to me that, here too, things are more complex than they seem. One probably has to go back to McCarthyism, which was an attempt at intellectual terrorism on the part of the reactionary right: one had only to be the least bit critical to be accused of communism. It was the period when the distinction was made between liberals and radicals: liberals, in the political sense of the term, are what we would call "moderates"; they were - and are still- in favor of equality of the sexes and of the races, but on the basis of an individualist and contractualist philosophy, guarantor of the rights inscribed in the Constitution and its famous amendments. The radicals of that time professed the same philosophy but extended it by means of a militancy directed against the Establishment and all the institutional forms judged to be hypocritical and surreptitiously repressive. This form of radicalism, still close to the ideals of individualism - my rights in opposition to the encroachment of the institution - was replaced by a new form of radicalism that broke with the system at the very level of the principles that liberals and radicals, regardless of their differences, had still shared. In this way we see, formulated by feminist groups, associations of homosexuals, movements based on ethnic origin, demands grounded no longer in alleged wrongs inflicted on individuals in present circumstances, but in injustices committed in the past with respect to membership in a group. The fact of belonging to a category injured in the past, therefore, becomes a basis for demands. The new argument rests on what could be called a change in the principles of legitimation and of the justification for demands, in short, a paradigm shift at the level of political and juridical philosophy: to introduce considerations relating to group membership and to wrongs inflicted on one of these groups in the past is to go against juridical and political individualism and what could be termed the relation of contemporaneousness presupposed by contractualism. Having said this - and I think that one has to go directly to the underlying principles - the actual behavior given the label of political correctness must be handled with caution. In my opinion, to be fair and precise, types of behavior should be put along a sliding scale depending on whether the new paradigm is confined to the role of adjusting the


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political and juridical philosophy inherited from the Founding Fathers or whether it is clearly substituted for the latter. So, no one is undermining the classical foundations of life in society when they recommend, as is common practice in many universities - at Chicago, among others - the use of an inclusive language, which speaks of men in the sense of males and of women in the sense of females. One does not say "men" but "men and women," "he and she," or "humans." In other words, one does not use the word "men" in the generic sense. In the same way, people are strongly advised not to use language that explicitly or implicitly excludes women or African-Americans, homosexuals or lesbians, and so forth. This careful attention to language is not unbearable in itself, although the moderate expression of political correctness may signal the threat of a language police and hence an attack on freedom of expression. One moves on to something more serious with the espousal by many institutions of what is termed "affirmative action": in the case of two candidates supposedly of equal rank with respect to the customary criteria for recruitment, themselves in keeping with classical, political, and juridical philosophy, the administration reserves the right to prefer, for example, a woman over a man, a black over a white, a Hispanic over an Anglo-Saxon, and so on, by reason of the wrong done in the past and, it is true, also in the present - to the group to which the individuals in question belong. Inasmuch as this policy is declared openly and is supported by at least a tacit consensus of the community, it can be seen simply as the expression of a corrective justice attached to an abstractly egalitarian distributive justice. But even more so than in the case of inclusive language, one may fear that this preferential policy may come to explicitly contradict the principle of equal opportunity that is effectively based upon tests of qualifications for which individuals strive, as individuals, being judged in terms of their current performance. Two philosophies come into competition here, without any compromise being argued. One cannot but invoke Rawls's thesis here,s which holds that the first principle of justice, positing the equality of individuals before the law, is lexically prior to the second principle, requiring that in unequal distributions the law of maximizing the minimum should prevail, that is the protection of those worst off. Consequently, if one follows Rawls, who in this respect remains within the tradition of juridical individualism and contractualism, one cannot employ a social policy which, in order to remedy past injustices, would begin by violating the principle of the present equality of individuals before the law. Now this is what political correctness begins to do. To my mind, a more radical stage of paradigm substitution is reached

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when attacks are made on the idea of universality underlying that of equality before the law. The threshold is crossed when the debatable but not scandalous idea of corrective justice is supported by an ideology of difference, directly applied to membership groups (sex, sexual orientation, ethnic group, social class, etc.). Ultimately, the "rights" inherent in these groups are themselves declared to arise from different principles and the mores proclaimed by these groups are held to be incomparable. Stemming from this explosive mixture of corrective justice and the ideology of difference, troubling practices begin to assert themselves on the public stage. Some are simply ridiculous: it will be said, for example, that only women can give seminars on women's studies, only blacks can direct black studies. More debatable is the attempt to introduce quotas of feminine authors or of ethnic minorities in drawing up a curriculum of studies, even of proscribing classical writers declared to be sexist, macho, colonialist, etc. The damage is still no doubt minimal, inasmuch as the most extreme demands meet solid resistance from the administration and the university community as a whole. It is, nevertheless, potentially devastating: the ideology of difference, by failing to differentiate among differences, destroys the critical spirit which rests on shared common rules of discussion and on the participation of communities of argumentation recruited on bases other than the historical constitution of different group affiliations. The paradox is indeed that the praise of difference ends up reinforcing the internal identities of the groups themselves. The harm produced by political correctness becomes obvious when certain forms of discourse are forbidden; then it is freedom of expression, the formal condition of free discussion, that is threatened; and political correctness tends toward a sort of inverted McCarthyism. A strange paradox is taking shape before our eyes, namely the transformation of the libertarian ideals of the 1970s radicals into repressive pressures. I would nevertheless like to retain from this serious dispute, on the one hand, the notion that the classical philosophy of individual rights is less and less apt for the demands that are supported by entire communities claiming an indivisible collective identity; and on the other hand, that the ideology of difference, if pressed to its extreme, takes too little account of the ideal of universality, which, rightly or wrongly, has classically been tied to juridical individualism. The idea of individual rights and that of universality are in the process of taking separate roads. This is why I am more interested in the debate between universalism and communitarianism, which permits a glimpse of more fruitful mediations.


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• How do you explain the importance this ideology of political correctness has acquired? • Don't lose sight of the place where it is trying to take hold: the campuses. I picture the American college campus as a vast archipelago, spread over the surface of the United States, cut off from the land of real life. When they leave it, after having spent five or seven years there, the students all of a sudden give up their habits of marginal or bohemian life and instantaneously take on the outward signs of social life: suit and tie. Political correctness belongs to a universe that is forgotten as soon as one steps out of it, the universe of professors and students; in other places outside of the campus it is much less in evidence, although one can point to lawsuits that have been brought concerning hiring or lodging, on the basis of a set of arguments involving political correctness. The development of political correctness in the campus archipelago is also explained by the fact that in the rest of the country we are dealing with a system that is in no way Jacobinical and which, consequently, only reinforces the institutionalizing of customs. Wherever state laws are extremely weak, there is a greater tendency to engage in particularities, to follow historical traditions, and to self-regulation, which can either move toward centralization or greater dispersion; at the moment, Americans are moving more toward redispersion. Bill Clinton's failure to establish a health system on the national scale is a good indication of this. In the United States the universal does not operate at all in the same way as here. It is certainly not by chance that it is in the United States that the great debate has developed between Rawls, who holds to a kind of universalism in juridical and moral matters, and those who are termed "communitarians," who insist upon taking particularities into account; among these are people of high quality, such as Sandel or Walzer,6 who have nothing to do with political correctness. In addition, one must not underestimate the importance in the United States of associative life, which includes the dimension of volunteerism I was talking about. This is a form of self-governing relations which, outside the campus, involves large sectors of cultural life. There is no doubt that it represents a factor of fragility with respect to homogenization, a factor of the great susceptibility to fragmentation. This associative life forms a reticular fabric in which the pyramidal elements are much less important that the networks; Hannah Arendt was so struck by this that she introduced it on the speculative level in her work.

• Is not the United States simply passillg through a crisis of Puritanism?

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• I completely refuse to use this word with the connotation it has in France. We often forget that Puritanism was itself a high, clearly defined culture. Let us instead speak of "fundamentalism." But fundamentalism is not found on campus; in the world of the university there is only the expression of religious forms that have already integrated many critical elements. That outside of the universities, certain intellectuals - in particular, those whose culture is scientific and technological and who have no habit of critique -take the Biblical text literally and believe in the literal reality of the creation in seven days, the story of Adam and Eve, and so on, this is true; but this is inconceivable on campus. The culture of the archipelago is entirely at odds with that of the continent. Moreover, there is no doubt that the liberal forms of Catholicism, Protestantism, and Judaism that are found in the universities have been factors or accelerators for secularization. This is why the hard core of what Americans call "organized religion" is constituted by fundamentalism but this is for the most part outside of the university.

• It remains that American democracy, unlike the French, is explicitly anchored in religion. Does this have a connection to the problem of multiculturalism? • The two phenomena are inseparable in the case of the United States, where there is nothing equivalent to the historical and political role played in France by the state in the formation of the nation, nor is there any equivalent to the revolutionary break which destroyed all the intermediary associations and placed in direct confrontation - almost short-circuited-the individual citizen and the state. In France, the state represents the universal at the very level of its political constitution. One must never forget that this is something that has no parallel in the United States, where the nation was constituted by the successive waves of emigrants, all bearing their traditions and their culture. The American nation, despite the features of universalism contained in its Constitution, was formed from the bottom up, unlike our own, and on the basis of strong communitarian experiences. The way in which it was written is significant: bit by bit. Seven or eight eastern states first grouped together, then an agreement was established between the Bostonians, who were merchants in the main, and the Southern planters. From the outset - this is something that Tocqueville saw clearly - the Federal government was defined with limited powers. While the powers of the different states were enumerated in an unlimited way, those belonging to the Federal state were enumerated in a limited and exhaustive manner. Even if a universal meaning is attached to the Federal, the latter is defined by the limits that are marked


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by the other authorities subordinate to it; there is a delegation of powers enumeratively limited. Once again, this is completely different from the French system. American multiculturalism is, therefore, based on two factors: the constant generative force of associative life, and the priority of local powers over federal power. This is the reason why the American discussion between universalists and communitarians, which often seems abstract to us, has an entirely concrete basis in the United States. To our eyes as Europeans and as French, the universal possesses an abstract, trans-historical character, without reference to location or epoch, individual or group adherence. And, moreover, the historical has long been the province of the nation-state. When one enters into the American discussion between communitarians and universalists, one has to recognize that it is anchored in a historical context that is quite unlike our own. If one were to make a comparison with a European country, it would probably be with Germany after 1945, which went back before its totalitarian history and connected up again with the full, strong tradition of the debate between universalism and culturalism, the apex of which had been the period of romanticism. It is undoubtedly not by chance that our two points of reference for thinking in a more dialectical, less antinomic manner about the relations between the universal and the cultural in particular are the American and the German models. On our side, due to the lack of our associative, communitary experience, to define the citizen we have available to us only the face-to-face relation to the state .

• You seem to deplore the absence of any intermediary level between the individual and the nation-state. Is this not the void that decentralization was supposed to fill? • Certainly, but this was done by fragmenting the state and creating a political regionalism, which is entirely different. In French-style decentralization, the state lost control over things that in fact are related to its sovereignty. The fragmentation of sovereignty creates political voids and for all that still does not offer the fullness of associative life. We are paying for this today in the spread of corruption at the local level and by the proliferation of "affaires." But I deplore this void for another reason, which relates to the problem of representation in our democracy. Ideally, a Deputy is a fragment of myself projected into the political universe. But today, citizens no longer recognize themselves in the class of politicians: "my" Deputy, instead of being the same as me, as soon as he or she begins to circula te in wha t has been called the" microcosm," becomes other than

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me. The crisis of representation is essentially the result of the fact that, between the level of the individual and that of the state, there is nothing. In political philosophy, this is the question many people are working on. I am thinking, for example, of Walzer's legal pluralism, as he strives to pluralize the very concept of "justice" in terms of the multiple "spheres" to which we belong. His enumeration is, moreover, very interesting: we have membership in a legal space but also in a system of needs; the civic sphere is itself only one of these spheres, caught up in a constellation, a network. But I am also thinking oUean-Marc Ferry's book, Les Puissances de l'experience and of what he calls the "orders of recognition," which make up the various places in which we construct our identity.7 His vocabulary is borrowed from what is most interesting in Hegel's political philosophy, the idea that practical morality resides in customs, mores, and consequently in institutional hierarchies found at every level: family, civil society with its system of needs, its jurisdiction, and its administration, then the state properly speaking. Don't forget that the Hegelian state crowns a hierarchy in which all levels are occupied. These "orders of recognition" are, in fact, our true allegiances. I wonder whether it would not be a reasonable project, even if it could easily be labeled reactionary, to try to revive the idea of political representation for our different systems of allegiance. This was one of the aspects of General de Gaulle's 1969 referendum; he had thought that this reform had to be linked to that of the Senate, which no one was concerned about. In itself it was a perfectly legitimate idea, and I have the feeling that we will once again have to move in this direction. To what do we belong? What are our orders and places of recognition? How can we have a political representation of these places of social and civic recognition? For instance, for those of us who are students and professors, how can we bring it about that the university, with its obligations, its rights and its interactions, be represented as one of the components of the political realm? Could we not reconstitute the political by starting with all the intermediary organizations to which we are bound by our allegiances at the same time as they are, for us, the means of recognition? The term "recognition" seems to me much more important than that of "identity" which is the focus most of the time of the debate on multiculturalism. In the notion of identity there is only the idea of sameness; whereas recognition is a concept that directly integrates otherness and allows a dialectic of the same and the other. The demand of identity always involves something violent with respect to others. On the contrary, the search for recognition implies reciprocity. And one can follow this dialectical schema of recognition from the


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biological level- where identity is defined by the conquest, on the part of the organism, of both difference and complementarity between the self and the nonself - up to the sociological, juridical, and political level. On the juridical plane, I found this in the penal system, when I adopted the idea thatthe problem is not solely, nor even fundamentally, that of punishment, but that of the recognition of each person in his or her proper place. It is a matter of saying who is the guilty party, who is the victim, of employing the language of the law that places each one at the proper distance; in other words, it is above all a matter of mutual recognition. And often it is much more important to have said who is the guilty one than to ha ve punished tha t person: for punishing is causing more suffering, it is adding one suffering to another suffering, without lessening the former. However, the victim must be recognized as having truly been injured: the language that states this must in itself have a therapeutic role. The idea of recognition thus has a heuristic power starting with the biological level all the way to the political level, passing through the ranks or orders of recognition in the social dimension and through civil and penal law, civil law being the place where damage calls for reparation and most often for remuneration, and penal law that where imputability calls for penal sanctions. • By stressing the theme of recognition as you do and by underscoring the part of historicity that weighs on every political system, are you not in fact placing yourself on the side of the communitarians in the American debate? • In truth, I prefer to approach the problem in a different way; perhaps it is my obsession for reconciliation. I approach things on the basis of the ethical presuppositions of the discussion - in a Habermasian style -which assumes unlimited deliberation, without the constraints of time or participants, and I try to determine what is lacking in this approach that describes itself as transcendental pragmatics. The entire question is then whether one can contextualize the universal while keeping it as a regulative idea. This is very similar to the project of transcendental thought, which by definition functions only in conjunction with the empirical. The best example of this is provided in Kant's system by the example of the theory of law, which is the only case where one sees at work the actual integration of the transcendental and the empirical: the conditions for the functioning of society, in fact, are defined by conflict, by "unsocial sociability" (this is Kant's expression), and it is here that the project of the recognition of "mine" and "yours," which is the very basis of law for Kant, must be established. A project of distinguishing between "mine" and "yours" must be linked to the conditions of

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the exercise of "unsocial sociability"; we have in this an exemplary model. In the opposite direction, if we start with communitarianism, we find that living communities, making explicit their shared understanding, to use Walzer's term, leave untouched the problem of the principles of the rules of the game, or, if you prefer, the principles of the rules of compromise. In order to ground the rule of justice which redistributes the spheres of justice in their rightful place and at their proper distance, there must be a regulative principle; and this is where we encounter the Habermasian or Rawlsian problem of the principle of justice. It is this to-and-fro between communitarianism and universalism, on the basis of their recognized shortcomings, that interests me, much more than having to situate myself in relation to one of the two positions; it is their dialectic that seems fruitful t,o me . • Fruitful in the sense that it could be transposed outside of the United States?

• I feel that it could be of great therapeutic value to us, to the extent that we lack the intermediary level between the individual and the universalist claims of the state. Specifically, we need to find in the selfstructuring of the nation-state the elements of a communitary history, or a history of communities: communities that have been erased and obliterated by the censure placed on them for two hundred years. This does not mean applying to France measures taken elsewhere: every system has its drawbacks and its advantages, and it is. incumbent on it to reform itself in accordance with its internal capacities for improvement; this is true at all levels of social life, and this includes the university. We cannot imitate the American university in France: we start from the hypothesis of a free education and from diplomas that have a national character; all of this presents enormous drawbacks, as we well know, but we have to correct our system on the basis of its own characteristics. Now it does happen that today in France we almost have an equivalent of the debate between universalism and communitarianism, with the discussions on the problem of the political void produced by the delegation of sovereignty by the citizen to the state. This delegation occurs by means of elections, but in France the only election that really counts takes place every seven years: the presidential election. If, as many people say, there is a deficit of democracy, it is certainly here that it is most visible. This deficiency is dangerously supplemented by the institution of public opinion polls - which I think deserve harsh words because they present themselves as a substitute for deliberation. The


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polls are not a form of deliberation: people are consulted one by one, and then their opinions are added up. At no time is there any debate; the figure that results from this is in no way the product of deliberation, as is implied in principle by an election. Moreover, quite often, the election itself is no longer the end product of a debate, but is itself only a full-scale opinion poll. What should never be more than a means of information about the state of opinion, for the use of politicians, is transformed into a sovereign authority that decides candidacies, their number, the identity of the candidates, etc. • In saying this, are you thinking of a sort of bicameralism? • It is true that the systems that function well are those that do indeed have a bicameral system: whether this is the United States, where the states have equal representation in the Senate - two per state, regardless of its size, the same for Arkansas as for New York - in Germany, with the Bundesrat and the Bundestag, or in England, and the system peculiar to it. In France we have reduced the role of the Senate too much, limiting its function to that of a chamber for reflection and discussion, the power of decision ultimately lying with the Chamber of Deputies, become once again the National Assembly. How far will the crisis of representative democracy go in France, along with the discredit it brings to the political class? Will it be enough to reform the system by a mode of parallel representation or must the system of representation be entirely overhauled? This is certain in any event to be the problem of the coming decades. • You were saying that the question of communitarianism is inextricable, in America, from that of the anchoring of democracy in religion. Isn't this finally the starting point for all the differences between France and the United States? • Tocqueville had perfectly recognized that one of the singularities of the United States had to do with the fact that, unlike France, they had not experienced any radical, intractable conflict between the Enlightenment and religion. A conflict took place but it was played out within Christianity, between a democratic form of management of religious communities and a hierarchical conception of the episcopate. Consequently, an alliance in fact, which was also an alliance in thought, was established between forms of ecclesiastical practice that can be called antiauthoritarian and a conception of the state as being under the eyes of God. The balance between the religious and the political, upon which the

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United States was founded, is rooted, moreover, in a history of religion that is itself an antiauthoritarian and pluralistic history. From the beginning of American history, the famous Founding Fathers, the Pilgrims of whom Walzer has spoken so well,s had the idea that several sorts of denominations ought to be able to live in the same public space. From the outset, they held as self-evident a conviction that we were able to reach in Europe only painfully, and only in the territory of the Germanic Holy Roman Empire, at the end of the Thirty Years War. This was where the idea, as yet very restricted, was conceived that there was room in the same political space for two religions, on the condition that each of the component states was homogeneous; this was the principle cujus regio ejus reiigio, for each region, its own religion; this was a sort of multidenominational mosaic and not the genuine religious pluralism that, in the United States, was recognized from the start as a founding principle. It is particularly important that the idea of tolerance was from the outset a religious idea, unlike the use of the term current here, where "to tolerate" means to put up with what one cannot prevent. In the United States, tolerance has long rested on a genuine acceptance of diversity; the recognition, even from within the ecclesiastical theology characteristic of certain denominations, of the fact that there can be other bearers of a share of the truth; at the founding of the political history of the United States, there is the idea that the public space is the place of cohabitation of several religious traditions. For Tocqueville, it was just as important as not having any enemies, not to have to continually resolve the problem of war and peace. This is how the Americans answer the problem of the foundation of democracy. For in a democracy there is always the question of knowing what the Constitution is founded on, what it is based on, if not on an implicit consensus, on a relation of mutual trust; lacking a consensus, we would be dealing with a sort of self-foundation on a void. Americans themselves have instead the strong feeling of a distant and indirect foundation - yet one that is still well anchored - in a fundamental religious pluralism. This in no way prevents there being a complete separation between church and state on the institutional level. What one can say is that the way the political sees itself includes a religious dimension, which follows no institutional mold. One must go even further and say that tolerance extends not only to non-Christian religions - American Jews have not suffered the forms of discrimination experienced by European Jews - but also to those who do not recognize the grounds for religion: agnostics and atheists. The political history of the United States has been marked by the integration of all parties in the sphere of public discussion.

France/United States: Two IncomparabLe Histories

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• Have you read Tocqueville extensively? • I have read him very often, I don't know how many times. What is absolutely astonishing is that he foresaw what would be the major drama of American society: namely, the problem of the blacks. In the final pages of Democracy in America, he posed the problem in its most radical form: either the United States would be a multiracial society, and this would finally be the reign of the metis, mixed-race, or else the blacks would be eliminated as the Jews had been from the Iberian peninsula by the Spanish and the Portuguese. Sooner or later, the United States would find itself confronting this alternative. And it is true that it has constantly oscillated ever since then between exclusion and assimilation. In fact, most of the blacks you see in the street are of mixed race, quite simply because in the plantations the slave owners exercised the droit de cuissage. The mixing of the races was part of the mores and customs, and became a sort of social practice. The history of America is a strange history: emigres came to a territory which was already inhabited by people - the Indians - and exterminated many of them, pushed others onto reservations; but at the same time, these first immigrants brought along other emigres, by force, who were their slaves. It is a singular history that has no equivalent in Europe. This is why I always return to the idea of incomparable histories, and consequently to the specificity of ethnic and political problematics. This is also why the universal, in this domain, cannot be constitutive but regulative. • Can you give an exampLe of a universaL idea in a regulative sense? • One of those I am particularly keen on is found in Kant's "Perpetual Peace": it is the idea of "universal hospitality." The third definitive article reads: "The law of world citizenship shall be limited to conditions of universal hospitality. Hospitality means the right of a stranger not to be treated as an enemy when he arrives in the land of another. It is not the right to be a permanent visitor. It is only a right of temporary sojourn, a right to associate. They ha ve it by virtue of their common possession of the surface of the earth, where, as a globe, they cannot infinitely disperse. "9 Has anyone noticed tha t this is a Copernican-type argument, resting on the idea that we live in a finite space? Humans could always go elsewhere; but since we are obliged to live in a finite world, we then have to be able to live anywhere: "and hence must finally tolerate the presence of each other. Originally, no

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one had more right than another to a particular part of the earth. "10 As in the preceding articles, Kant insists that it is not a matter of philanthropy but of right. "Hospitality means the right of a stranger not to be treated as an enemy. "11 This passage is truly astonishing, with the idea of invoking geographical finiteness: because the earth is round, its inhabitants must tolerate one another, that is, be able to live anywhere on the round ball. Hence it is the very principle of right - the coexistence of free wills in a finite space-that leads to hospitality. What a fabulous argument! If you think about it, this goes against the idea of a promised land, since everyone in the world can by right live anywhere. This does not mean that everyone thereby becomes a citizen of anyplace at all; in other words, the argument does not attack sovereignty in any way, it attacks xenophobia. There is a space of jurisdiction which is the state; and Kant says only that every person has the right to live in this space of jurisdiction, to be received there . • Don't you see in this a reminiscence of the Bible? • Undoubtedly: the famous triad comes to mind: "The orphan, the widow, and the stranger at your door." The orphan is the one who has lost the support of an ancestral lineage, the widow the one who, having lost her husband, does not benefit from the levirate, and finally the stranger is the one who is without rights except precisely the right created by hospitality. Kant was imbued with Biblical culture; that ought to be self-evident. An idea like this one has a value of regulative universality. I strongly stress this transcendental level in opposition to the idea that one could generate a principle of cohabitation of a political nature on the basis of specific spaces of mutual recognition. This is where, in my opinion, the weakness is to be found of communitarians such as Walzer in the United States or Boltanski and Thevenot in France. 12 For the political sphere continues to preserve its specificity in relation to this level of mutual recognition: it contains an element of power, of sovereignty, and therefore it poses the problem of its necessary limitation. A problem that cannot be deduced from any consideration that could be said to be geographical, cultural, ethnic, hence communitarian. With this problem of limitation, we are on the level of Kantian philosophy, where reason serves to limit the claims of this or that agency. In the social system, state sovereignty constitutes the principle of limitation regarding the claims of subordinate "spheres"; in its turn, political sovereignty encounters the question of its self-limitation on the occasion of its claims to legitimacy. This question immanent to sovereignty is so

France/United States: Two Incomparable Histories 67 insistent that it reemerges at the heart of definitions of the State that make explicit reference to the use of violence as a last resort, as in Weber, compelled in his definition of the state to term this recourse legitimate. Now, precisely, what is it that ultimately gives the epithet legitimate this value of internal limitation on the ultimate exercise of violence if not a universal regulative idea? One could say that the communitarian principle is constitutive, whereas an idea like that of hospitality is regulative: it serves as a limitation on the claim that a power might have to elevate itself to the extreme.

• But then the value of universality would have to be recognized by consensus. This is just what is contested today. • But as soon as one recognizes at least partial rules of play, even those of a gang, one can regressively determine the conditions of the possibility of a minimal recognition in a space of exchange. And there one will again always find a universal prior to the regional operations of the spheres of recognition. In other words, the most radical critique of my thesis, a critique that would lead to a sort of communitarian nihilism, would be the idea that one cannot recognize any kind of social tie; this would be the hypothesis of a wild creature, with no ties. I have to say that this hypothesis seems as abstract to me as the one which cultural relativism strives to combat, the hypothesis of a universal. This is why the distinction between a constitutive universal and a regulative universal offers a resource because it allows us to seek a point of intersection between founding on the basis of mutual recognition and the absence of an ultimate ground of this mutual play of recognition; starting from the absence of the ultimate character of a purely historical constitutive principle, the necessity arises of a universal that is solely regulative. This is the way that I would argue, treading in the footsteps of Kant, and the way I would attempt to go beyond the debate between the universalists and the communitarians.

Chapter 3

From Psychoanalysis to the Question of the Sel~ or Thirty Years of Philosophical Work

• In 1965, after three volumes of your Philosophy of the Will, where you had already touched on the problem of psychoanalysis, you published Freud and Philosophy: An Essay on Interpretation. The least that can be said is that this work was not received calmly in the psychoanalytic community • The reception of this work in France was in large part dominated by its rejection by Lacan, a rejection expressed publicly in his seminar as well as in private. I was accused of silencing the understanding of Freud that I was supposed to owe to him. I should like to say in this regard that there are several misunderstandings intertwined in this quarrel. I shall begin with the one that questions my good faith. It has been remarked that I attended Lacan's seminar before the publication of my book, and the conclusion was drawn from this that I had borrowed my interpretation of Freud from him. There is the matter of dates here that I should like to clarify. I first presented this book on Freud in my teaching at the Sorbonne before I went to Lacan's seminar; this can be verified in the lists of course titles. In addition, in 1960 at the invitation of Dr Ey I gave a lecture at Bonneval, which was published only in 1966 and which can be found in The Conflict of Interpretations.! Jacques Lacan, colleague and friend of Dr Ey, attended this lecture, and publicly praised it, before accompanying me back to Paris and inviting me to his seminar. Now this lecture contains the essential elements of my interpretation of Freud, which had ripened over the course of my earlier teaching at the Sorbonne. My book, then,

From Psychoanalysis to the Question of Self 69 had for the most part already been composed; it had, at any rate, been thought out in its general lines before I attended Lacan's seminar. This is, moreover, an example of an incredible lack of intellectual integrity on his part: for the discussion that took place after my lecture, in which he participated, was eliminated from the published volume of the Bonneval colloquium at his request. The other texts generally are followed by the discussion to which they gave rise, but not mine. This text is a key text because it presents my overall interpretation of Freud's work, namely that the Freudian discourse is composite, and hence of great epistemological fragility, for it plays on two vocabularies: a vocabulary of energy, with terms like repression, energy, drive, and so on, and on the other hand, a vocabulary of sense and interpretation, present in the very title of Traumdeutung, The Interpretation of Dreams. I held that this composite character was to Freud's credit, moreover, without classifying it as a defect of conceptualization or of epistemological lucidity; I saw this as a deliberate use of a language appropriate to its object, which itself is situated precisely at the point of articulation of the domains of force and of language. This misunderstanding, which cast doubt on my good faith, was found in Michel Tort's article, which appeared in Les Temps Modernes under the title, "La machine hermeneutique"; this was a devastating article that blasted me and said in essence: Ricoeur spoke once of the unconscious in The Voluntary and the Involuntary, he speaks about it a second time in Freud and Philosophy. What was there between these two works? Nothing, except Lacan. But what there was between them was my own exploration of symbolic language in the framework of my book The Symbolism of Evil, and, consequently, the emphasis on the linguistic dimension of our relation to the unconscious. This dimension is in fact brought to the fore in Lacan, but I had coordinated it with the energetic, dynamic dimension, instead of opposing the former to the latter as he does. • What in your opinion did Lacan want from you? Why this cordiality directed toward you? • I think that at bottom he expected from me what he had wanted first from Hyppolite2 and then from Merleau-Ponty: a sort of philosophical backing. I obviously disappointed him on this score. • And you yourself, what did you expect from his seminar? • I lived through those meetings as a sort of obligation, terrible drudgery and frustration, which I assiduously imposed on myself, because I always

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From Psychoanalysis to the Question of Self

had the impression that he was going to say something important that had not yet been said, that this would be said the next time and so on; he had a consummate art of suspense, which I found absolutely intolerable. For me it was really an ordeal to go back time after time, feeling a kind of obligation but also an incredible disappointment. I remember going home one afternoon and saying to my wife, "I've just come from the seminar; I didn't understand a thing!" At that moment the phone rang; it was Lacan who aked me, "What did you think of my talk?" I told him, "I didn't understand a thing." He hung up on me. With regard to Lacan, I felt very intimidated. In every sense of the word: I became timid but also I had the sentiment of being subjected to a constant threat of excommunication. Anyway the atmosphere of veneration that reigned at the seminar was stupifying! It was unimaginable that someone could stand up and say that he had not understood or that it was absurd ... Here I experienced the inverse of the American seminar. But the most "serious" thing remains to be said. I had written in the introduction to my book that I would speak of no one but Freud and that I would quote interpreters only on a given, specific Freudian theme. So I set aside from the outset all the other Freudians. I set aside those whom Lacan himself criticizes, and rightly so, especially in fact the American psychoanalysts - even if it is regrettable, let me say in passing, that he is unaware of the most interesting among them, those who developed the narrative aspect, the role of narrative in the reconquest of a coherent story through the cure; the latter I encountered in New York, where I participated for a year at Columbia in interesting seminars conducted by psychoanalysts. But I also set aside Anna Freud, Ernest Jones, Winnicott, Bion - whom I had discovered during the same period - and, finally, Lacan himself. This was the unpardonable mistake, to have placed Lacan under the same banner as the postFreudians; this, for him, was a serious offense! Perhaps he expected a book that would have been a sort of reinterpretation of Freud on the basis of his own writings, which I had not begun to read before attending his seminar .

• Later when you read Lacan's writings, what did you think of them? • Elisa beth Roudinesco made what, for me, is at once the most favorable and the most crushing statement on this topic: 3 Ricoeur could not have borrowed from Lacan because he has understood nothing of him. I have to say that this is true. I do not understand this form of articulation or of thinking; it is entirely foreign to me. I do not understand how this thinking works; at times I am dazzled, as if by

From Psychoanalysis to the Question of Self 71 flashes, but without being able to follow the thread of his discourse. I I have always been sorry suspect that I must not be the only one about this and quite often have felt it was a kind of infirmity on my part. In a certain manner, as you see, I have remained a prisoner of that intimidation.

• You have told us that, after the fact, you reproached yourself for having underplayed the clinical aspect in your book, and for having overplayed some of Freud's theoretical writings, in particular those on metapsychology. But you also devote a large part of your analyses to the Freudian interpretation of culture . • Concerning your last point, I in no way regret this. I continue to owe much to this theory of culture. The Future of an Illusion, Civilization and its Discontents, the correspondence with Einstein on war and peace, Moses and Monotheism are texts with which I continue to battle, and which I would place on an equal level with Nietzsche's texts on religion, corrosive as they are. I include them both in what at the time I called the "hermeneutics of suspicion." As for my reproaching myself for having understated the clinical aspect and for having overemphasized Freud's theoretical writings, I have given a full account in an essay published in Belgium - and not in France! - in the volume in honor of Alphonse de Waelhens, Qu'est-ce que I'homme?4 To give full credit to the conceptual resources offered by its practice, I tried to characterize psychoanalysis by three features. First, the fact that the unconscious speaks: psychoanalysis would not be possible if there were not a sort of proximity between human drives and language. This is another way of restating, in other than epistemological terms, the union of the dynamic and the interpretive. Second, the drive is addressed to: there is in it the feature of being addressed to the father, to the mother, and so on - the Oedipal complex would not be comprehensible if there were not at the very outset a sort of relation to the other which is genuinely constitutive. Third, the narrative component of the analytical experience: the fact, first of all, that the patient brings fragments of narrative, but of a shattered story, with twists and turns which the patient can neither tolerate nor understand; in a certain way, the task of psychoanalysis is to reestablish a story, rendering it intelligible and acceptable. Today I would say that not only has theory in Freud perhaps been overvalued, but in addition it has not been seen that theory lags behind in relation to his main discovery, which is precisely in the area of narrative, far from biologism, far from scientism. This is not incompatible with Lacan, to the extent that I understand him.

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It seems to me in any case that if one takes analytical practice seriously, and if one admits that it is in advance of theory, then one has to have a certain familiarity with what goes on in the course of a cure, and in particular with the episode of transference. I increasingly think that this is where it all happens. Moreover, Freud says as much in his writings that are collected under the title Papers on Technique. Later, I was led to reflect on the notion of Behandlung, of "handling" - a notion that cannot be captured in the nets of interpretation in a purely linguistic sense, and which designates a relation to instinctual drives, a handling of forces. • You have spoken of several misunderstandings concerning your book on Freud. • I was also thinking about an error made regarding what was supposed to be my intention - I have already alluded to this in the course of our discussions. People attributed to me the idea of attempting to include psychoanalysis within phenomenology, and beyond that, within its hermeneutical version. I have said quite the opposite, namely that there is something irreducible in it and that here phenomenology encounters its limit. With psychoanalysis, I was confronted with something that resists a theory of consciousness. It is true that I had not, at that time, taken seriously enough the aspects of phenomenology that are concerned with passivity: passive syntheses, in particular. There would probably be some bridges, some passages possible between phenomenology and psychoanalysis, but by some path other.than that of a theory stubbornly centered on consciousness, of a phenomenology in its most idealist phase as this is found in Husserl's Cartesian Meditations.

• In the years that followed the publication of your book on Freud, and after three years at the University of Louvain, you returned to your teaching at Nanterre. You had a seminar on phenomenology? • It was called "Phenomenology, hermeneutics." After a certain length of time we added "and the philosophy of language." It was the period when I was introducing themes of analytical philosophy (in the AngloSaxon sense) in the seminar; this was also the period when I introduced the theme of action.

• In the debate in those years, marked by the famous opposition between explanation - which was held to be the task of the natural

From Psychoanalysis to the Question of Self 73 sciences - and understanding - which was held to be the work of the sciences of culture and the mind, what side did you take? • I do not think that hermeneutics and epistemology are distinguished by two separate methodologies, two projects of intelligibility; these two perspectives intersect over and over again, are in constant interference with one another, first of all because the term" hermeneutics" subsumes at least three things: precise methods containing rigorous rules - this is the case of philology and the exegesis of the great classical texts, such as those of jurisprudence; next, a reflection on the very nature of understanding, its conditions and its operation; finally, a more ambitious axis, a sort of "philosophy" that presents itself as another path of intelligibility and that claims to understand scientific endeavors better than they are able to understand themselves, fencing off these endeavors within the limits of a sort of "methodologism." This is more or less the position adopted by Gadamer, in relation to which I have taken a certain distance. Now hermeneutics, even in the first sense, that of exegesis, constitutes to my mind an epistemology, in which intelligibility is saturated by the notion of "sense." What is more, when science is understood not through its objects, its methods or its principles, but as a theoretical practice, it obeys an intentionality proper to it which cannot help but raise the question of its sense: the legitimacy of a hermeneutics in this sense is therefore entirely well-founded here. This is, as a matter of fact, a hermeneutics of scientificity as one practice among others. This is what has led me to reject the opposition introduced by Dilthey and developed by Rickert between "explaining" and "understanding."5 In opposition to this I reaffirm the constant intersecting of methods: linguistics and political economy, in particular, mix inseparably together the explanatory mode and the comprehensive mode; econometry, for example, obeys an explanatory method. The natural and the human do not, therefore, constitute two fields where one would have to be assigned to science and the other to hermeneutics. In this regard, lowe a debt to Jean Ladriere,6 who has made a remarkable analysis of the different modes of explanation. He distinguishes four of these: explanation by subsumption, placing a fact under a rule (exemplification of the principle); explanation by reduction, explaining a phenomenon by the what lies beneath it (to a large extent what human biology does when it notes the conditions necessary for the appearance of a given organ, without thereby explaining the production of the phenomenon by what underlies it); genetic explanation, in which a given phenomenon proceeds from another through a series of ordered transformations; and, finally, explanation by the optimum,

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attaining an optimum level of functioning of coordinated and convergent subsystems .

• What do you think, then, ofHeidegger's famous statement: "Science does not think. "

• If one conceives of science not as a theoretical practice but as an intellectual operation resembling a calculation, then one can affirm as he does that "science does not think." But this is provided thinking is restricted to the capacity of that being in the world that I am, as a concerned being, to grasp hold of itself in its self-understanding; the science of nature is not, in fact, this type of thinking. It could never think its object in the mode of human concern or, to use my own terms, in the mode of action. In the order of actions, in fact, it is always possible to find an agent behind the objective systems, the economic, political and other systems in which the agent has been engaged. The subject of thinking can always try to correct herself in her activity with respect to the products of that activity; on the side of nature, the concept that would be closest to that of action would be productivity, by which phenomena, facts, are placed under principles; and these explanatory procedures, whether they be causal, genetic, structural or the search for the optimum, allow us to account for the way in which a given set of facts are placed under certain principles. The autoproduction of nature, to borrow an idea already developed by Hegel, cannot be thought after the model of human thinking, that is to say, after the model of selfreflection capable of correcting itself with respect to what it produces. I am genuinely committed to maintaining this distinction between thinking under the category of action - that is, thinking what human beings do - and thinking under the category of production - thinking the way in which facts are subsumed under principles. It is true that one could be tempted to believe that this subsumption depends essentially on models that we ourselves have worked out, and that this modeling does make the productions of nature resemble the products of human thought. But it remains nonetheless that the representative character of the model in relation to the domain it models remains a puzzle. This representativeness is presupposed, it is not produced in the sense in which an action is. So it is really impossible to consider as identical the production of nature and the self-understanding of the agent in his or her action. This is not a matter of returning to the nature/mind distinction: the mind itself knows through its forms of passivity (the biological base of life, all the mechanisms of mind that escape us, such as inventiveness, the production of ideas, and so on) a sort of autoproduction comparable to nature's, and just as puzzling. So that,

From Psychoanalysis to the Question of Self 75 here too, we control by our concerted action only a very small portion of the activity of the mind. Once the intelligibility of nature and that of action have been clearly distinguished, it is possible to ask about the meaning of the intelligible whose production we find puzzling. From the very core of this intelligibility arises the question of the meaning of the scientific enterprise which then enters into the field of action: "doing science." Action thus defined is then in quest of its self-understanding. But neither is this a matter of reducing the specificity of science surreptitiously for one cannot understand the sense of the activity without doing it; it is in relation to its project - why do you want to understand nature? - that it has to be analyzed, and it is in unfolding its own project that science discovers, piece by piece, some fragments of its meaning. Theoretical practice is the practice of an action that understands itself in the search for intelligibility: the knowledge of nature as production which I cannot reduce to an action of wanting to know, which is not itself entirely transparent to itself. But the mind cannot grasp itself in its totality, and it knows itself, precisely, only in the scores it plays, formed by the different actions it undertakes. Science can think its own end only in the very process of the development of intelligibility that it produces; finality is, then, immanent in the very operation of science itself. If one asks toward what goal this project is ultimately directed, and what distinguishes it from other projects that guide our actions in other domains, I would call upon Jean Nabert, for whom several fields of profound intentionality remained open, subsumed under the idea of the just, the idea of the true, and the idea of the beautiful, and forming as many centers of reflection. Science includes the idea of the just, if only in the necessary competition of concurrent hypotheses, where each one is bound by the obligation of listening to the other's reasoning and of taking it into account in the process of discussion. And perhaps science also conforms to the idea of the beautiful, if one thinks of the wonderment, the admiration it professes before the beauty of nature. Curiosity, in fact, is not enough to account for scientific activity, which cannot be determined simply by psychological motives, any more than it could be inspired solely by that other motive- the will for domination .

• How did your phenomenology seminar function? • It was in the United States that I learned how to conduct a seminar. I have always thought of it as very demanding for the participants who were supposed to contribute actively to it. Thanks to the American model, I always resisted the tendency of many French research centers to become lecture machines. Moreover, even in France, I almost always

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had American students, and they were the ones who often set the tone. I tried to establish the same practice as on the other side of the Atlantic: at the first meeting, I proposed ten or so books and about twenty articles to be read by all, and I made it clear that I would strive to move among these texts, so they would be the common realm of experience for the instructors and the members of the seminar. This practice of the seminar is the reason that, in my books, I always focused more on my students than on an outside public. So that I was rather well armed against criticism, except that of Lacan, who questioned my intellectual honesty. All the rest seemed perfectly normal to me; I never felt myself to be personally attacked by them. For, at bottom, one thing truly preoccupied me: the consistency of my discourse; for me, it mattered above all to resolve my own contradictions, the tensions between various influences. My problem was always to determine whether I was constructing false windows, whether what I was doing was merely a compromise, or if it was really the proposal of a third position capable of holding the road. These were my concerns. But I never felt what I later read about myself, that I had been "in seclusion" until recently - forgotten. On the contrary, I had always had the feeling of having the audience I deserved, neither more nor less; the great satisfactions of teaching and satisfactions I would call conceptual in my relation with myself. This is how I traversed extremely varied philosophical landscapes from the existentialism of the 1950s. I paid relatively little attention to what the expectations of the public might have been, and so the idea of building a faithful readership never crossed my mind, perhaps mistakenly so. When I have written a book on a topic, I don't speak about it after that, as though my duty has been done in its regard, leaving me free to continue on my way. It is in this way that I dropped the problem of psychoanalysis, but also that of metaphor after The Rule of Metaphor. • This is why people have sometimes had the feeling there was a kind of break in your course from one book to the next.

• Yet it is often in the remainders from an earlier subject that I have seen the urgency of another theme. This is true of my relation to psychoanalysis, since it is truly from The Symbolism of Evil that Freud and Philosophy stems. Having adopted a line that was broadly speaking that of the phenomenology of religion, close to Eliade, I distinctly felt that in Freud, Marx, and Nietzsche there was an opposing thought that I had to come to terms with.

From Psychoanalysis to the Question of Self 77 • This was also the period when you crossed through the structuralis «landscape," to use your expression. The upshot of this journey was precisely, in 1975, The Rule of Metaphor. This was another way of testing the phenomenological method. Some may have believed that you had become a structuralist! • I have always made a clear distinction between a structuralist philosophy and a structural study of specific texts. I have considerable appreciation for the latter approach, because it is a manner of doing justice to the text and of extending it to the fullest dimension of its internal articulations, independent of the author's intentions, and hence of the author's subjectivity. This aspect of structuralism was not foreign to me as I had always espoused, under the tide of the semantic autonomy of the text, the idea that the text escapes its author and signifies for itself. Now this semantic autonomy of the text opened it up to approaches that take into account its objectivity alone, as what is said, written, and so objectified. I take objectification in a very positive sense, as a necessary passage by way of explanation, with a view to a better understanding, before the return to the author. I distinguish this from a structuralist philosophy, which draws from its practice a general doctrine in which the subject is eliminated from its position as the author of discourse. I am at one and the same time an habitue of structural practice and in a conflictual relation with structuralism, which seemed to me to attain its highest point in Levi-Strauss, the member of the structuralist school whose work I most respect. We had, in the philosophical circle of Esprit, a very interesting confrontation, in which I introduced the expression "transcendentalism without a transcendental subject" to characterize his position. For me, he was an adversary against whom I strove to measure up as a worthy opponent, in my defense of the philosophy of the subject; I saw him as the one establishing the level of the discussion. In my eyes, he incarnates the model of a work conducted without the slightest concession.

• It remains that his analysis of myths, deliberately stripped of the vertical dimension of transcendence, did not satisfy you. How far do you go along with Levi-Strauss? • I am thinking in particular of the "finale" of The Naked Man.? In relation to this text I feel a sort of admiration at a distance; a reverence for an enterprise which is genuinely different, but which counts. For there are also many works by other authors that are very foreign to me but which do not count for me and of which I do not speak. With Levi-Strauss, I had tried to argue on the basis of his own theory,

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starting from the distinction he makes between a "cold society" and a "hot society." He defines the former as a society on which history has no hold, and in which myths and discourses are also to be taken as "cold" objects, resting in a conceptual empyrean; myths and discourses said by no one, addressed to no one - they are, possessing a sort of objectivity. But in other societies, with which he has not been concerned - to an initial degree the Greek world, but to a much greater extent the Semitic world - history is constitutive, not only of self-understanding, but of the very content of what is said. The fact, for example, that a large part of the theologies of ancient Israel consisted in placing certain stories in a selected order and that, consequently, this society invested them with meaning through narrative, implies that history is not just something that has an external hold on discourses, but that it is constitutive of them. It is not simply an object but an operative mode. • It is true that the Greek myths, the Judeo-Christian myths, but also Indian myths offer in relation to the Amerindian myths, to which LeviStrauss has always confined himself, the noteworthy difference that they present themselves as possessing a metaphysical- ifthis be the right word - significance. • I believe that Levi-Strauss chose the object domain that reinforces his theory; I would say that one finds in him a sort of joint selection of doctrine and of field. What would he say about the myths you refer to? Perhaps he would reply that our own interest in the relation between the existential and the transcendent causes us to value them, but that if one were to approach them with a philosophy in which the structural constitution were the preferred manner of signifying, then it is easy to relate these productions to an imaginary realm, the source of illusions, after the manner of Spinoza. What is dominant in his conception is certainly the idea of the homogeneous character of all structural systems, using the analogy of the brain with its neuronal structure: it is as though there were a neuronal man who was replicated in a man of myths. Although you would also have to eliminate the word "man" • Others besides Levi-Strauss actually did eliminate it. What was your feeling about Foucault's declaration of the death of man? • The idea that man is a recent invention seems to me sheer invention. I am thinking, for example, of the "Ode to Man" in Sophocles' Antigone, where we read: "There are indeed many marvels (polla ta deina) in this world, but nothing is more deinoll than man" (lines

From Psychoanalysis to the Question of Self 79

332-7). More marvelous? more terrible? more formidable, in the literal sense of the word? How could we forget the Stoic concern, the mastery of desires and passions, to which Foucault himself returns in his later texts, which I greatly admire, The Use of Pleasure and Care of the Self. But precisely, this is a philosophy quite different from the one he had developed in The Order of Things. I had many reservations about that book. The idea of episteme that replaced one another with random transitions not only seemed unintelligible to me, but more importantly, I found that it was not based on a wealth of content great enough for each of these episteme. How could one speak, in the seventeenth century, of the episteme of representation without taking into account mathematics, or the law, to say nothing of theology? Foucault seemed to me to take too limited a sample in each case to be convincing. To have placed under the category of correspondences everything that preceded the seventeenth century did not seem to me to do justice to the incredible variety of philosophies and thoughts from the Renaissance and the sixteenth century. On the other hand, I devoted an entire section in the third volume of Time and Narrative (1985) to The Archeology of Knowledge concerning the concept of "discursive formation."8 I discuss in great detail his idea that the continuity of memory, and hence of the history of the subject, is an idealist illusion. This was the period when I was beginning to discover the theme on which I am now working and which remains an enigma to me: the Zusammenhang des Lebens, or the "coherence of existence," which is located beneath consciousness and which, as a consequence, escapes the criticism that it would be an idealist claim on the part of the subject to demand it for itself. It is to the extent that Foucault distanced himself from himself with his last two books that I felt closer to him; but I never had the opportunity to tell him so. That is a meeting that never took place. Certainly, he was expecting nothing of the sort, and I was on paths where I encountered him infrequently, except at very localized points of intersection. • Among the theorists of structuralism, you pay a lot of attention to Greimas. • With him, at first, I found myself in confrontation. I recall our first meeting: I had tried to explain that structuralism represented a stage in my own discourse, the passage through the objectivity of the text. He had answered: "In sum, you encompass me. But since you are speaking, I do the semiotics of what you have said, so I encompass you!" That is how we began. Little by little, we got beyond these conflictual rela tions,

80 From Psychoanalysis to the Question of Self which were followed by years of deep friendship, mutual respect, and even affection. I did lengthy analyses of his book on Maupassant's novella Two Friends; I went quite far in my argument on behalf of Greimas, based on a genuine effort to understand his project. I think, moreover, that this exercise is a good example of my critical relation to the structuralists. I have great respect for their reasoning; as a result, the point of divergence is very carefully set out and grounded in a sustained effort of understanding. More generally speaking, I talk only about authors that I can go along with far enough to say that, although my separation from them is costly to me, it also benefits me because I ha ve passed through the school of their challenges. Those with whom I do not have this relationship of productive conflict, I never speak about. This explains a number of my silences, which are the result not of ignorance, nor of disdain, nor of hostility; they come solely from the fact that I do not encounter these authors. To employ Greimas's categories, they play the role neither of helpers nor opponents; they are in a neutral position. They are located in places where I simply do not go. • You give some unforgettable examples of this relation of productive conflict in the three volumes of Time and Narrative,9 with your discussion toe-to-toe with Saint Augustine, Aristotle, Husserl, and Heidegger. • I had - but I would be incapable of saying when - a sort of flash of insight, namely the intuition of a relation of inverted parallelism between the Augustinian theory of time and the notion of muthos in Aristotle's Poetics. It was this sort of sudden collusion between distentio animi in Book XI of the Confessions and Aristotelian muthos that was not only crucial for what followed, but seminal; the idea, to paraphrase the one we were speaking of earlier, that time is structured like a narrative. This is the card I played in that book: how far can one go in the presupposition that time becomes human only when it is recounted, that the passage by way of the narrative is the elevation of the time of the world to the time of man? • Looking back upon your course from The Voluntary and the Involuntary to Oneself as Another,1O with lengthy detours through Freudian theory, linguistics, structuralism, and so on, do you see a series of broken lines or a trajectory whose thread is apparent to you? • You are placing me here on the terrain of self-interpretation, and my own is of no more value than anyone else's.

From Psychoanalysis to the Question of Self 81 • Perhaps, but of no less value either. What is the interpretation of the reader of yourself that you are? • I am not entering into the choice between the alternatives, continuous/discontinuous. What I believe, or at any rate what I can tell about myself, is that each book is determined by a fragmentary problem. I very strongly hold to the idea, moreover, that philosophy is addressed to specific problems, to well-circumscribed difficulties of thought. So metaphor - it is first of all a figure of style; narrative - it is to begin with a literary genre. My books have always been limited in scope. I have never posed massive questions of the type: what is philosophy? I deal with particular problems. The question of metaphor is not that of the narrative, even if I do observe that there is the continuity of semantic innovation from one to the other. I see the tie between my different books in another way. After having completed a work, I find myself confronting something that has escaped it, something that flies outside its orbit, becoming an obsession for me, and forming the next subject to examine. I cannot account for this subterranean tie. Why did the question of narrative impose itself on me after metaphor? Of course, I could draw a line between the two: in both books, it is a matter, as I have just said, of semantic innovation, in other words of the question: how do we create meaning in speaking? We create it by placing together incongruous semantic fields this is metaphor - or by constructing a plot - this is narrative. So there is a certain homogeneity of the two subjects, under the sign of semantic innovation. But to what extent is this simply a retrospective discovery? I believe that anyone who writes has this experience of a theme that at first prowls on the edges of consciousness, then comes to put itself at the center and, finally, becomes an obsession. The last time this happened to me was when I had been invited to give the Gifford Lectures in 1986. So this was only a short time after Time and Narrative. My first reaction was to ask myself what I was going to talk about. I told myself that after all I had to come to grips with the question of the subject. This forced me to take a recapitulative path in which I consider, in succession, the field of language, tha t of action, and that of narrative identity, before arriving at ethics and ontology. The connection between one book and another is never the same from one instance to the next. Freud and Philosophy in a certain sense got away from me, since it was supposed to be a response to The Symbolism of Evil but instead became a book on Freud. The Rule of Metaphor ll is, finally, in a critical relation to The Symbolism ofEvil and to Eliade in the sense that in it I was asking myself if there was not a structure of language that had been studied more thoroughly, that was

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better known than the symbol- itself a vague notion used in so many different ways, from the symbols in chemistry to the symbol of the monarchy. By contrast, thanks to the long rhetorical tradition, we understand better how metaphor operates. I asked myself then whether I could not pour back into a kind of rhetorical receptacle all of the diffuse problematic of the symbol, providing it with a strong semantic framework. In fact, what I produced there was a semantic theory of symbols. One could say, then, that what I did in The Rule of Metaphor was to take a step back since I returned to the theme of The Symbolism of Evil after having passed through Freud, but also after having encountered the linguistic tools I did not possess at the time and which I did not even know then: propositional semantics, pragmatics of language, the theory of utterance. It is here that my stay in the United States was entirely decisive; encountering Max Black, in particular, was very important since it allowed me to become acquainted with theories of metaphor that rested not on deviant naming but on deviant predicationY You wanted to know if there was continuity or rupture between my books: here is a particular type of continuity, which proceeds by returning, taking a step backwar~s. The same is true for the narrative, which I had encountered long before Time and Narrative, when I was publishing History and Truth (1955),13 and even - myths already being narratives - as early as The Symbolism of Evil. In this way, one can say that the theme of the new book is off-center in relation to the preceding one, but with a return to subjects that had already been encountered, touched upon, or anticipated in earlier discussions. What had been a fragment becomes the new envelope, the totality. But I am particularly aware of the fact that each book has a limited scope. And it is from the reflection on its limits that the obsession with a new subject arises. Just as the theme of memory now torments me as not being treated in either Time and Narrative or in Oneself as Another.

• In speaking of theories of metaphor, you alluded to the grafting of Anglo-Saxon philosophies onto your own. Your teaching in the United States must have opened up for you vast domains that were completely unknown, at that time, to most French university professors . • I could almost say that the American university was above all for me a great library and a great bibliography! An open bibliography thatthen became unavoidable. I discovered authors, works, and doctrines whose very existence was unknown to me. It is enough to go through the

From Psychoanalysis to the Question of Self 83 bibliography of the works consulted for The Rule of Metaphor and Time and Narrative. This enabled me to balance off my Germanic background without in any way erasing it: I continue to owe just as great a debt to Kant, and I would be willing to say that I have never ceased to be, ultimately, a sort of post-Kantian, if only through Husserl and Nabert - even a post-Hegelian Kantian, as I jokingly call myself.

• You mentioned, but only in passing, the composition of Time and Narrative. We obviously cannot go into these three volumes in detail, there being no replacement for a careful reading of them. Could you at least say something about the general architecture of this work? • I would like to begin with two guiding concepts: those of "configuration" and of "refiguration." They gave me a better way to approach a question I had examined in The Rule of Metaphor under the title of "metaphorical reference," but then it had been hastily. In that work, I was concerned with the problem posed by the capacity displayed by language to reorder the experience of the reader. At the end of the book, I had only postulated that, when language is reorganized in a creative way by metaphor, a breakthrough is made in experience, that is to say, we are invited to read our own experience in accordance with the new modalities of language. But there was a link missing in this last chapter: the role of the reader. This problem seemed to me to be mastered better in Time and Narrative, since I devoted two entirely distinct sections to it: one concerned wi th configura tion, namely the narrative opera tions a t work within language, in the form of emplotment of actions and characters (these are the first two volumes); the other concerned with refiguration, namely the transformation of one's own experience under the effect of the narrative, and this is the object of the third volume in its entirety. The problem of configuration is treated in three language practices: first, placing myself in the field of ordinary language of conversation, I open a lengthy discussion on the mimetic character of language, and I try to show that the notion of mimesis itself functions in a dialectical manner, as being first imitation, next reconstruction, and, finally, the transformative capacity of experience; then comes the second discursive field, history; and, lastly, the third discursive field, fiction. But whether it be in everyday language, in history or in fiction, I remain within the milieu of language. This is why I deal only with configuration, reserving entirely for the third volume the ultra sensitive, and ultracontroversial, problem of the movement of language outside of itself and its capacity to redirect, restructure an experience, to produce a new manner of inhabiting the world.

84 From Psychoanalysis to the Question of Self So far as history is concerned, I have to specify that in Time and Narrative I am interested in only one problem: to what extent is history a narrative? This is why in my current investigations on the relations between memory and history - which I shall discuss later - I am trying to fill an obvious gap in this approach, a gap that was determined by the selective and exclusive nature of the question posed. At that time, this question was of great urgency for me; we were still in the era marked by Fernand Braudel and the Am-lales school, a period that had witnessed the retreat of events and narratives, the demise of political history, diplomatic history, the history of battles, and so on, to the benefit of a history that could be termed more structural, taking into account forces of gradual evolution and, consequently, of long duration. In Time and Narrative I make the necessary concessions to this discipline to assure myself that, if history is narrative, it is so in a completley different way than ordinary language, which rests on the direct, immediate storytelling of speech: with history, one is dealing with a highly constructed narrative. I take as an example favorable to my thesis what at first appears to be a counterexample: Braudel's great book, The Mediterranean and the Mediterranean World in the Age of Philip II; I try to show that, ultimately, this is a gr,and narrative in which the hero is the Mediterranean. The end is not marked by the death of Philip II but by the disappearance of the Mediterranean as a historical hero and its effacement as the center of the world. Today, it seems to me that this quarrel generates less heat. • What was the reaction of the historians? • I was invited by them on several occasions; I had good relations with the historians, unlike what had happened with the psychoanalysts. With Fran

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